Sunshine
by Sisimka
Summary: Two hundred years after the Reaper War, John Shepard remembers only that he was once a man and that he made a choice. As a ghost, he roams the galaxy, attention called by disparate events, until a ripple of 'something' calls him to the Kepler Verge. Written for: Mass Effect Big Bang, Fall 2013 (ME3 Ending Spoilers)
1. one

one

His favourite colour had always been blue. The ocean, the sky, those flecks of unexpected cobalt embedded in grey stone, cornflowers, morning glory, the eyes reflected in a mirror. The Alliance. Earth from space. The charge beneath his skin, the glow that outlined his fingers at a thought, vapour licking at his heels as he sped through space, the ball of cleansing fire loosed at his enemies.

The fine tracery of veins beneath skin painted a blue so dark it was almost black—except where it wasn't.

When he died, the galaxy turned blue. White blue flames licked over his arms, dissolving his skin in a cleansing fire of ethereal pain. He remembered the pain. He remembered coming apart, the process of being undone as motes of self pulled free, faster and faster until he lost cohesion. His voice was the last thing to fade; a moan that grew louder, shuddered through him, trying and failing to hold him together, maintain the integrity of being. The last sound a roar, a primordial cry as he became as infinite as the stars.

He did not remember his name. A whisper caressed the nascent bubble of being he carried within. The memory of a sound like the ocean. A sigh. A single kernel of self rippled beneath his touch, knowing without knowing, that it was his.

He did not remember whose skin had been painted with lines, but he knew it had been a person. One being, as distinct from the pulse of occupied space.

But he knew he had died. That thought was known to him, as was his current reality. He knew he was no longer a he, but the pronoun gave him a sense of self. He suspected needing such a sense, requiring it, ran counter to his objective, but he had been at work for a long, long time. And time had rippled and bunched, the flow inexorable, unsteady. A piece of it awaited him right there, and he slipped into it, the space of nothingness, and he breathed.

He was infinite. He remembered everything known by a thousand thousand species. He remembered nothing.

He remembered blue.


	2. two

two

"Shit!"

Kat stuck the tip of her finger into her mouth and sucked. The taste of copper caressed her tongue. She should have been wearing gloves, but she'd worn through the sensitivity of every last pair of Real Fingers she'd brought with her and her suit gloves were too thick for delicate work. What she needed were gloves with integrated circuits.

"Dream on."

They cost more than pseudo-skin.

Tapping her omni-tool, the bright blue glow of her specialist upgrades rendering the usual orange a sickly shade of pale brown, Kat muted the wild vocals of Belt Force Five and then reached up to activate her comm.

"Watcha cookin' Finch?"

"Who says I'm cooking anything," returned a basso rumble only slightly flattened by transmission.

Kat pictured dark-skinned, meaty arms crossing themselves across a massive chest, the light of Finch's omni-tool flickering as it appeared to be crushed by the big bear of a man.

"You better be cookin' something. I just stabbed myself in the finger again and I'm hot and sticky and pissed at this asshole job at the shit end of the galaxy. Why the fuck did I take this contract again?"

"Coz you thought it would make you rich, but you keep spending all your credits on gloves." A pause. "How hot and sticky?"

Despite her mood, Kat chuckled. "Hot," she said, her voice as breathy as she could make it, considering it had to pulled apart and reassembled before Finch heard it, a bare instant later. "And sticky," she continued.

It was inevitable they'd hook up. She liked men, he liked women, and they were the only two souls in fifty million klicks of empty space. They'd met the day they shipped out and had fucked twice by the time they locked their magnetized boots to the deck of the _Bataille. _Once had been inside their own suits. Hands and frustrated body parts. End result was the same.

They worked opposite shifts. Jormangund wanted the _Bataille_ operational in eight weeks. That meant fifty-six days, twenty hours on, four off. Ten hours alone, each, four together in one cramped bunk or the other, bumpin' and grindin'. Sometimes they talked. Last night they'd cuddled. Kat had been tired and Finch had been accommodating.

Rather than let her thoughts wander toward what cuddling meant (or the inevitable question of whether they would they stay in touch when the job was done), Kat said, "Make us something spicy, eh?"

"You got it, Sunshine."

He couldn't see her grin, the way a little sun bloomed inside her chest. Just as well. It was a stupid reaction to a stupid name.

"See you at twenty-two or there abouts."

"Mind the traffic," he replied and clicked off.

Dead air hissed over the feed for a second until Kat tapped ear again, closing the channel. "It's a bitch of a commute," she murmured.

They were quartered in the first space they'd reclaimed, a small crew bunk at the ass-end of the _Bataille_. Toss in a gravity generator, fabricator, coffee pot and a crate of ramen and it was right homey. The crawl through skin of the ship, between the inner and outer hull, took about an hour, bunk to cockpit. There wasn't enough power to turn on environmental controls for more than two, three rooms at a time. Bunk, head, whatever section they worked in that day. And gravity generators were fucking heavy. So a suited crawl was the fastest route from A to B. Lots of handholds in the skin. Crawling felt more like swimming or flying with no sharp turns, inconvenient extrusions or bulkheads to block the path.

Sometimes Kat wandered through the derelict frigate, boots clamping down with an imagined sound that echoed through her thoughts as she studied the archaic design and odd junctions. Why Jormangund wanted this wreck, she had no idea. Wasn't her job to ask. They were here to rewire six hundred circuits, by hand. Fucking weird job, but it paid well, glove expense aside.

"Damn compartment is going to depressurize next," she muttered, feeling cheerfully fatalistic. Her suit would cut off her hands if she wasn't wearing gloves. The bubble of her helmet might stop her eyes from popping, if it activated in time.

She daubed a last glistening dollop of solder to the board, then activated the holographic overlay. Connections flickered to life, light chasing dark through a complicated maze. Her omni-tool vibrated happily, a preset signal telling her the board had synced with the other repaired circuits. She shoved it back in its hole and began collecting her tools, plucking each one out of the air around her.

A hum tickled her inner ear.

Instinct begged Kat to turn and look at the panel she'd just repaired. The loop wouldn't be complete, the system offline, until the job was done and some egghead from Jormangund input a special code sequence. The embedded organic circuitry had creepy implications, though. The sync mechanism.

"Don't ask, Sunshine," she whispered. The nickname didn't have the desired effect. She didn't feel the comfort of a large pair of arms, or the afterglow of fantastic sex. A chill descended her spine as she noted the flicker of light surrounding the panel. "Nope." Not good.

She reached for it without stopping to think and a shock traveled through her bare finger tips and up her arm. Fire licked along her veins, an icy burn like the scour of sand. An involuntary moan left her lips as memory took hold. The expected euphoria did not follow the creep, however. She had not dusted up, she'd merely been shocked, and it fucking hurt.

And she couldn't pull her damned fingers back off the panel.

Invisible hands wrapped around her ribs, squeezing the air from her lungs. Black spots danced across her eyes, blotting out the glow of the panel. Were lights rippling along the floor and wall seams? Kat yelled and shuddered and tried again to pull her hand away. Was like peeling a warm tongue from an icy damned pole.

Her bones ached, her skin felt as if it might rip from her skeleton. Gritting her teeth, the clench of her jaw sending a shock of a different kind through her skull, Kat inhaled through her nose, the scent of burnt skin and fried electronics working into her psyche. She pulled again, feet braced against the wall below. Her cry echoed dully within the sealed section of corridor. Sharp and anguished. Then she fell back, suddenly, as if she had been flung off a bucking bronco. Her head connected with conduit. Stars fought with the black spots and then won. And then lost. She heard someone groan. A buzz tickled her throat. Then it was lights out.


	3. three

three

A ripple solicited his attention. He arrived at the disturbance without thought, simply moving from one space to another, skipping or ignoring the constraints of time and distance. He was all; he was nothing.

The mote of self within asked a question. _"Where are we going?"_

He separated self from being and answered. _"The Kepler Verge."_

Talking to the kernel, the being that wanted a space of its own, had become habit. He did not know when it had begun, but suspected it had something to do with assigning a personal pronoun to the vastness of his existence. Change begged change and though time did not matter, the ebb and flow of it did. The galaxy was a creature. He had learned its habits and now he recognised his, or those of the person he used to be, the awareness awakening within. The man who liked a colour; a single colour.

A mass relay shimmered against the darkness. While he watched, energy cascaded around the rings and along the prongs. The gathering light simultaneously attracted and repulsed. A fever built, rings circling one another in a complicated pattern he understood. Understood! Then a ship exploded into being, shooting along the leading edge and out into the dark.

He followed the ship for a distance and then peeled off, coming away from that system and leaning into another like an arm reaching across the stars. Next to him, a different ship lay dead in the water of the starry expanse. He knew the name of the vessel, what it was. He did not know why he had been drawn to it.

Myriad pings and ripples had kept him occupied since the end of the war. He remembered that, the war. He'd given his life for it, after all; he'd plunged into the blue with a human cry and had given a new, inhuman oath, one that required no words, no symbols, only a dedication he could not foreswear as he had no other purpose.

The _Bataille_ drifted in silence. He pushed through the skin of its hull and paused as he felt a different flicker. Two distinct breaths of life. One halfway fore, the other aft.

_"Why are we here?"_

_"I don't know."_

_"We know everything."_

No, they did not. He didn't. Even the vastness of his existence could not know all. That had been his first lesson: how much he did not know, would never know, despite being...

_"Go on, say it."_

_"I'm not a god."_

_"We're a god."_

_"Shut up."_

The kernel whistled. Or, he thought it did until he realised the sound actually came from inside the _Bataille_.

It had taken him a while to recognise sound. The explosion of his death left him senseless in the most literal manner. He saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing. Smelt nothing. Took him a while to remember the fact of smell. He couldn't remember the other sense. The fifth one. Couldn't remember why he thought there might be five.

Sight returned first. It felt like a crutch, the fact he needed to see. More often, it dizzied him. Worried him. He could see and he could _see_. Through the eyes of all he held, he could observe nearly everything. A thought and eyes would open on the other side of the galaxy and watch a hexapod shuffle across the rust-coloured surface of Sharjila.

Sound returned next. He expected it and it happened. Generations passed while he learned to hear what he wanted to hear, rather than every voice in the galaxy, every breath of wind, the susurrus of forests, the roar and sigh of every damned ocean. Bubbles rising from a glass of _something_ on the Citadel.

Something blue?

_"Can you hear that?"_

_"Yeah."_ The word, the drawn out affirmation, sounded like a sigh.

He should know what it was, but he didn't. The superstructure of the ship dissolved before him and reformed behind him. A convenient fiction to cover the fact he could pass through anything. He could surf the solar flares. He'd tried that while trying to figure out touch.

"Sunshine!"

The yell jarred, ripping through the incoherent substance of his self. He turned in the direction of the call and _looked_ through half the ship, bulkheads winking out of existence. A human male, nearly two metres tall and massive, well over a hundred kilos of tightly packed muscle encased in glossy dark skin.

_Did I used to look like that?_

The kernel laughed.

"Damn it, Kat. Answer me." The large man hammered at the glow surrounding his left wrist as if he could wrestle the hologram into submission, make it report something it did not know. Then he cursed and issued a different set of instructions. The suit hanging from his hips like the skin of a half-peeled banana stiffened as he rolled himself back inside. A blue bubble of soap emerged from his neck, wavered in the dim light and began to grow around his head.

_"We didn't have those,"_ the kernel observed.

_"A lot of time has passed."_

_"We going to find Sunshine?"_

_Sunshine_. A memory tickled, of pale skin traced with lines; some dark, some light. Some red, some blue.

_"Yeah."_ It was another drawn out sigh. A whisper of reluctance.

He turned around and pushed forward through the ship.


	4. four

four

The stench of something foul pulled her back from the abyss. Kat opened her eyes and smacked her lips. They felt chapped and raw and the taste... Jesus H. Christ, she'd puked.

"Fuck." The word grated against her throat. Her head pulsed with an ache that spread forward from the back and climaxed at the front. She spoke again, the attempt garbled and half-strangled, and tried to move her arms. Her shoulders shrugged. She activated her omni-tool using the failsafe, three quick twists of the wrist. Light stabbed at her eyes, sending waves of dizziness through her skull to the sore spot at the back. Bile rose in her throat again.

"Kat!" Finch's voice thundered from her tool.

She floated against a wall, or floor, or ceiling. Head and stomach rolling in sickening unison, Kat abandoned her attempt to figure up from down.

"Finch," she murmured in response.

"What the fuck?"

"Touched something." The words were slow and clumsy, as if her lips and tongue belonged to someone else.

"Are you all right? I've been pinging you for ten minutes."

Reflexively, Kat touched her ear. She'd knocked her comm loose. She'd hit her head _hard_, then. She looked down (or up), stomach roiling as she sought small the piece of hardware.

"The ship rippled, Kat. The damn metal moved like…" Breath pumped through the connection, jagged and short. Kat pictured Finch hauling his large frame through the crawlspace at all speed, bending struts and ductwork. A smile tickled one corner of her mouth. "Like water," he continued. "Activate your helmet, I don't want to lose contact again."

"Aww."

"I'm not kidding around, Kat."

Activating the bubble that would enclose her head and protect her from vacuum, and various other hazards, would enclose the vomit smell. She'd be trapped in a world of puke. An exhalation of disgust scraped past her throat as she moved to do what she was told. Breathing vomit was preferable to breathing nothing. To having her eyes pop.

_Fuck_.

She made her arms work first, as if they had to pay the price of bile scented air. Her shoulders creaked and pain shot down her spine, pausing to revolve around her tailbone in a sickening swirl. Her stomach heaved. How had she managed to hit her head that hard? The hall was narrow, the walls a resilient mix of plastic and ceramic that was supposed to flex, almost breathe. This was the twenty-fourth century, after all. Ships had skin. They flexed like fucking gymnasts and pirouetted like ballerinas. Even old frigates like the _Bataille_. Except, this vessel wasn't powered. Flex remained offline. She'd hit a wall of solid glass without her helmet. She had thrown herself into the wall, ass-backwards, and her head had rung like a bell.

Before she activated her helmet, she reached behind her head, half afraid her bare fingertips would sink into a pulpy mess. She found a lump the size of Herschel, but no blood, no brains, nothing but hot and swollen skin to mar the back of her scalp.

The soft scrape of short, sweat-spiked hair touched off a thousand pinpoints of pain across her fingers, however. Kat grunted as she swallowed a yelp and pulled her hand away from her head so she could inspect it. Here fingers were not a black, charred mess. Bitter fluid burned her throat again. In the blue-orange light, her fingers looked as they always did, pale and featureless. Dark smudges at the pad of her thumb and finger tips might be burns. Hesitantly, she licked the tip of her index finger and winced as the shock of contact raced through fried nerve endings. Her suit gloves, if she'd been wearing them, would sense the damage and excrete medi-gel. Her suit gloves, if she'd been wearing them, might have saved her fingers from being burned in the first damned place.

Hand bent to save her fingers more pain, she wiped at her chin, dragging the dense fibre covering her wrist over the mess dribbled from lip to neck and then bumped the tab for her helmet and waited for the bubble of eezo to form around her head, stink and all. Air briefly tickled her cheeks. Kat closed her eyes and floated in a swirl of dizziness while she waited for the recycler to deal with the smell.

Then she flicked her eyes open again.

"Who's there?"

No one answered because no one was there. She'd hit her head pretty hard, not surprising she thought she saw…no, _felt_ a ghost.

"Creepy damned ship."

The empty ship didn't bother her, not really. Was kinda peaceful most days, when she and Finch weren't making noise. In fact, this job, glove expense aside, had been one of the easiest she'd taken in a while. Relaxing, in a way. Good company, good pay. Passable accommodations; having a grav generator in their quarters was a luxury.

Kat pulled a set of gloves from her belt and stuck her hands into them. Her suit embraced the cuffs and a pale green light flickered in the periphery of her vision. Suit containment complete. Her fingers stung and then went pleasantly numb as gel seeped into her skin.

Her ear itched and she ignored it. Couldn't scratch through the bubble. Clumsy suit gloves were good for rearranging boobs and balls, but that was about it. The itch grew more insistent and Kat activated the medic program. She watched the display for a while, head thumping in time with the digits rolling up and off the HUD, none of them really relevant to the lump on the back of her skull or the numb fingers of her right hand. Like a good little program, the suit would start with baseline stats.

She smacked the side of her helmet gently, annoyed by the itch in her ear, and gasped as her vision swam, taking her guts along for the ride. Fuck. She'd just hit her hit head. _Don't do that again_. She looked over at the panel, the slim outline of one end of it, anyway. It continued to glow, just that one, stupid panel. _What the fuck, man?_ Kat rolled to her side, waited for her dizziness to peak and dip and then pushed gently away from the wall, one hand tugging a tool from her belt. That panel had to come out. Then she could spend her evening filing an incident report, in quadruplicate. And then, Finch could kiss her boo-boos better.

Before she could reach the panel, Kat felt herself bounce backward. She didn't move back, she was pushed.

"Huh?"

She swam forward again and met the same resistance. The lurch back didn't sync well with her aching head. And, of course, the itch in her ear got worse, 'cause being bounced from an invisible wall, every motion jarring Olympus Mons there, on the back of her fucking head, wasn't enough. No. She had to have an itchy damned ear as well. Her bladder would cramp next.

She'd just have to piss in her suit.

Extending one hand, Kat poked at the invisible barrier. The itch in her ear crept toward a sound, a low pitched hum that tickled her memory. Hadn't she heard a hum before? When the panel started to glow.

"Weirder and weirder."

She set her comm to auto send/receive and called the only other person on the channel. "Finch?"

"What's up?"

"Weird shit."

"I'm nearly there."

"I'd come meet you in the skin but I really think I need to get this panel out of the wall first. That's when things started to get weird. I plugged in a panel and it started glowing. Then it shocked me."

"Shouldn't be power, only sync," Finch huffed.

"You're telling me. Burnt my fucking finger." Before throwing her into a wall, where she nearly split her head open and coughed up her breakfast noodles. They hadn't done the sick thing, yet. One of the differences between a hook up and a relationship was the lack of coddling (and cuddling, usually). Wasn't enough time to catch a bug and treat your lover to green-faced and gassy alternative selves. Thank Christ.

She reached out to touch the barrier again. "There's like this invisible bulkhead or something. Maybe it's a failsafe?" An extrusion of eezo designed to protect stupid people from poking their fingers into shorting circuits.

"A what?" Finch asked.


	5. five

five

He couldn't feel her touching him. Not really. But he could imagine he did.

_"Tickles," _the kernel observed_._

The brush and poke of the woman's gloved hand did not tickle.

Ignoring the observation, he studied 'Kat'. Another human; female, tall and slender. In contrast to her companion, her skin was pale, almost translucent but for the two spots of high colour on her cheeks. Beneath the twin arches of slim, blonde brows, grey eyes widened and narrowed as she continued to test the barrier between herself and the panel. Patterns from the bubble of her helmet shaded the short blonde hair that covered her head. The boyish cut did not detract from her femininity. High cheekbones, full lips and the outline of her suit—out at the shoulders, rounded over her breasts, nipped in at the waist and out again over hips that drew his attention over and again—proclaimed her gender and a note of sensuality.

_"She's definitely got appeal."_

_"Her appearance is of no consequence."_

_"So, you'd be just as happy to let a pod crab tickle your belly."_

_"I do not have a belly."_

He'd had one, once. He'd been human, too. He remembered that…and an appreciation for the female form.

_"Why are we protecting Sunshine?"_

_"I don't know." _

Another ripple traveled through the inflexible skin of the ship, causing it to creak and groan. The woman turned and gaped at the wall behind her, then reached out to touch _that_. He was there ahead of her hand, a wisp of his being, insubstantial as the stuff of the universe, but hard and impenetrable.

"What the fuck?" she said.

_"Don't touch it." _

The woman didn't hear his voice; he didn't have a voice. She seemed to understand she'd been enveloped in a field of something, however, and as most compressed substances were want to do, she agitated. Around her, the walls of the corridor continued to flex. Without power to activate the expansion molecules, stress quickly overwhelmed the rigid structures. Cracks leapt along dim surfaces, darker than the dark grey walls. The sound of them rent the air in a series of breaks and pops. One wall emitted a shrill squeal before snapping along a jagged scar into two uneven pieces.

"Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit."

Atmosphere began to rush through the breach, whistling, then howling as air pushed the wall apart and hammered against the struts and ductwork lining the inner hull. Slowly, the pressure equalized and clanks and bangs faded. The ship continued to flex, however, and stress fractures rippled across more of the walls. Bulkheads groaned and buckled, pipes bent and broke. Steam puffed out and froze solid, and then cracked into pieces, the plink of each hitting the deck muffled by the rumbling groan of the entire ship.

"Finch!"

Looking through the frigate, twisted bulkheads and fractured walls no impediment to his far-reaching gaze, he searched for the large man and saw him stretched in an implausibly lean line, half in, half out of the ship. His gloved hands were attached to a bent strut and his suited body extended outward at a ninety degree angle, the soles of his booted feet pointing toward the asteroid that spun below the _Bataille_. It looked as if the man skipped over a boulder in the blackness of space. Then the ship rolled, vented gasses providing enough propulsion to nudge it from the stable orbit it had occupied for a decade.

_"Why aren't we protecting him?"_ the mote of self asked.

_"I don't know."_

The urge wasn't there, the instruction incomplete. If he was a program, the parameters did not include rescuing the large man named Finch.


	6. six

six

"Finch! Answer me, damn it!"

Kat fought panic, horror and anger, all in equal measures, the portion of each enough to tip her over the edge of sanity and into madness. She'd seen bad stuff. Some of her dust dreams had left her questioning the purpose of the universe. But nothing compared to actually being in a ship that seemed intent on ripping itself a part, _and_ being caught in a bubble of weirdness at the same time.

Behind her, electricity arced away from the panel, white blue in the hazy atmosphere. She couldn't hear the crackle of it over shrieking tear of metal, ominous groan of struts bending, the entire superstructure of the ship twisting, and the snap of plastic sheeting as wall after wall cracked. She was aware of the small rotation of the ship as well. The corridor had begun to move around her. Beyond the gaping fissure—now set into the roof—electronics and ductwork popped and fizzed, raining sparks and spewing vapour. The entire frigate shook as if a giant toddler had picked it up and decided to play war.

She didn't want to be caught in the _Bataille_ as it came apart; she didn't want to trust in the freaky little bubble to protect her. Kat reached out to batter at the invisible barrier again and howled until her head spun. Then she sucked in a breath and attempted rational thought. Maybe Finch had been captured by a bubble, too. This piece of shit ship had some new-fangled atmosphere containment protocol or something.

"Goddamn it, Finch. Answer me."

The connection hissed in her ear, the one that didn't itch, and then a thin voice answered. "Here."

"Why do you sound like you're two systems away?"

He couldn't bug out, could he? The escape pods weren't online. _Nothing_ was supposed to be online! Kat shook her head. Finch wouldn't leave without her. They were friends and fuck buddies. That meant something in the world of mercenary engineering.

"I'm…the…looking at Rocky."

"What? Finch?"

Rocky was their name for the asteroid the _Bataille_ was attached to, or hidden behind. Ironically, parking the hulk near a mapped object made it easier to find, even while it remained out of view. Mostly.

Wait, if he was looking at— "You're _outside_ the ship?"

"S'cool, Sunshine. I'm hanging on."

The _Bataille_ lurched and shuddered again. Over the continual creak and grind, the new sensation jarred. Kat rolled sideways and then flinched as the inner wall buckled and a panel she had yet to touch popped out of its socket and flew into the invisible barrier protecting her.

"Are you in a bubble, Finch? A pocket inside some invisible shield-thing?"

"What?"

"I'm in a fucking bubble. That invisible barrier. It's all around me."

"That might be good."

The ship rumbled and jerked again and Kat fell against the barrier. Instead of bouncing her back the other way, the substance of it seemed to absorb her momentum. Freaky, freaky shit. A tremble caught her lips and fingers. Her legs shook as well. Her stomach rolled, just because it hadn't done that for a while.

_Fuck, fuck. _

In the midst of chaos, Kat found it difficult to summon logical thought. For a second, she imagined the weird barrier might protect her while the ship fell apart. But then she imagined being stuck in the bubble after, floating through debris, and knew she would die anyway. Without a tank, her scrubber could only recycle the air trapped in there with her for a limited time. Maybe two hours. Three? Seemed stupid to survive the wreck only to die after.

A fit caught her, limbs thrashing out, gloved fists sinking into the inertia of the barrier, heels mired in the mud of substance at her feet. Kat struggled, rage burning through her veins. "Let me GO!" Useless, her words were useless, but the scrape against her already abused throat felt like _something_.

"Kat?" Finch's voice punched through the fuzz of harsh breath and whining blood.

"God, Finch. I'm trapped. I'm stuck in here. I can't get out. I can't even move to try and shut something off, even if I knew what to kill. This is worse than my worst nightmare."

"You'll be all right, Kat. You'll be fine." Finch's voice rumbled quietly in her ear, soft and distant, but closer than the muffled death of the ship buckling and tearing apart around her.

"You still hanging on?"

A not silent hiss answered her.

"Finch?"

"I got shook off, Kat. I'm drifting."

"Do you have a tank?"

"Yeah."

A sob rose in her throat. Swallowing it made her ears pop. "How long?"

"A while."

Kat launched herself at the barrier again. "I'm going to try and get out of here, come get you."

"You do that, Kat and we'll watch the sun rise over Rocky together."


	7. seven

seven

He could feel her panic. It battered at him with the intensity of small fists and sharply booted heels. He couldn't absorb the sting of her emotions, though. Remove the energy, flush it out the other side of himself as heat, and cushion her as she fell back away. He could not soothe her rage and sorrow. He could only hold her in stasis as the ship flew part, a supernova of metal and plastic, wire and smoldering chipsets, vented gasses and frozen vapour. As the small pockets of atmosphere in the _Bataille_ disappeared, her death song quieted and finally absorbed by silence, the magnificence of her destruction reduced to a soundless opera of light.

It was beautiful. It was terrible.

He'd seen it happen before and he would again. Time and time again. His function did not include holding the galaxy together. After directing the Reapers to repair what they had destroyed, he had sent them home. They were dark and silent hulks in the dark and silent space of their own place. And he was alone, one entity as witness to a galaxy of change. Birth and death were single moments. Time attenuated and expanded, and moments were rare.

This moment, the destruction of the _Bataille_, stretched on and on and on and he could do nothing to shorten it. He did sift through the flying, sparking wreckage for clues, however.

He began with the panel that had sent the first ripple through the ship and by the time Kat learned her companion had been thrust outside the skin, he had traced the illicit circuit, the connection that was not supposed to exist, through half the ship. It was organic, based on the sync mechanism. It had achieved a low level of sentience, computing power increased every time one of the engineers linked up another panel. When complete, it would be a fully functional AI. He could not tell if such a result had been anticipated or if the organic being was an unintentional byproduct of meshed technology.

A moot point, now. Something had corrupted in the thought processes and the being attacked itself, which meant destroying the ship. Flex skin had been half activated and random compartments of the ship pressurized, which only increased the scale of the disaster. A ship flying apart under pressure exploded rather than simply slipping into disarray.

Kat continued to pummel the invisible membrane of his being. The primal sounds of her efforts loud against the winnowing drama of the _Bataille_. He wondered if he'd wrapped himself around the wrong thing. Person. Subject. Maybe he'd come to salvage the emergent intelligence currently bent on destroying itself. Or contain it. Make sure of its destruction.

_"Distracted by breasts."_

Did he imagine the stir at his centre? Vast as he was, the core of his being could be everywhere and nowhere.

_"Let's concentrate on the emergent entity."_

If he had to talk to himself, it might as well be a constructive exercise.

_"It's dumb and dying."_

_"Should I collect it?"_

_"You should destroy it."_

_"Is that why I am here?"_

_Why am I here?_

He forgot, sometimes, why he existed. Then he remembered the war.

_"I don't know what to do."_

_"Observe, wait, watch the inevitable cycle through time and retrieve your pets when everything falls to shit."_

_Shit_. A word they hadn't used before, not in this existence. Had he used that word when he was a man?

_"Probably. Heroes aren't perfect beings. We swore and drank and broke things. We killed and we saved, we hated and we loved."_

Blue lines and red. Orange. Curls and angles, shapes and sigils. Skin so pale, limbs so delicate.

_Sunshine. _


	8. eight

eight

"Talk to me, Finch."

"Talking uses air, you know."

Finch never used sarcasm and his tone rarely sharpened with bitterness. Even now, adrift from what remained of the ship, floating in vacuum with only ten minutes of viable air in his tank, he sounded only sad. Not angry, not mean. Raging against the machine would use valuable oxygen, she supposed. Kat would have done it, though. She'd have gone out screaming.

"I'm sorry," she said around the lump in her throat.

"S'okay, Sunshine. A minute here or there isn't going to matter, is it? I'd rather talk to you than watch the oxygen gauge."

His words where slow and careful, as if the air in his helmet had already thinned. Inside her bubble, her precious damned bubble that continued to provide something for her suit to recycle, Kat nodded. Then she breathed, a shallow gasp that left her lungs aching for more. Seemed unfair to breathe more deeply.

A tickle rolled down her cheek and hovered at her top lip. Pressing her lips together sandwiched the tear, spread it over dry, cracked skin. It didn't sting, despite the soft taste of salt.

"You're not crying over there, are you?"

"You kidding? I don't cry, Finch. Ever."

"Talk to me, then."

"I don't want to waste your air."

"Like I said, another minute isn't going to matter. Keep me company."

She was Saturn and the debris of the _Bataille_ circled her like a ring. Inside her bubble, Kat spun slowly, independent movement long ago abandoned. She looked out at the wreckage and sniffed. She tried to think of something to say that didn't sound mournful or too cheerful or just plain stupid.

"What's your first memory, Finch?"

The soft crackle of static filled her ears a moment and then Finch sighed, or breathed. "Dunno," he replied, his voice rendered thoughtful by circumstance. "I'll tell you something that stuck with me always, though. The first time I watched the sun rise. I was about six, I suppose. Maybe younger." Kat could imagine his big shoulders lifting in a nonchalant shrug. "Dad took me out on an overnight hike to Wright's Peak. Was damned cold, I remember that."

He paused for a moment and Kat let the seconds drift by. Urgency cramped her belly, but she just didn't have it in her to rush a dying man. And Finch _was_ dying…and there was nothing she could do about it. Closing her eyes, she let her head rock back into the cushion of the barrier, and sucked in air that felt foul and wrong, as if she'd robbed it from someone more deserving. She swallowed her sobs. Finch shouldn't hear her crying in what probably amounted to self-pity.

"I'd probably seen the stars before that. We all look at stars, don't we? I still do, even though I've been pushing through them for fifty some years. The wonder never fades, or it shouldn't."

Kat let him wander. She didn't care if he never finished the story.

"You still there, Kat?"

"I'm here. Tell me about the sunrise."

So, he needed a soft prompt.

"Most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. The sky was grey and then it sort of shifted through this spectrum. I remember thinking that if I blinked, I'd miss it and my eyes watered I looked so hard. Then I blinked and the sky seemed a bit lighter. Then lighter. The sun shimmered on the horizon and then it sort of just eased up, slow and steady. The sky got brighter, the colours…" He paused to breathe in soft, slow gasps. "They don't have names for all those greys and oranges and yellows. Then I blinked again and the sun was suddenly all there. I felt like I'd missed something. When I said that to my dad, he said I hadn't missed it, the sun always did that. Like it was magic."

He huffed, the connection hissing. Kat's stomach squeezed and fat tears rolled down her cheeks.

"Magic," she whispered.

"I don't believe in magic," Finch replied, his voice taking on a stretched quality.

"Neither do I."

"But some things just are."

"Yep." Seemed easier to agree.

"I'm going now."

God. Kat squeezed her eyes shut, swallowed over the sobs piling up in her chest, pushing them back down her throat. It hurt, like she'd shoved an apple down there. Her cracked lips parted. "I'll miss you, Finch."

"I'll miss you, too, Sunshine."

One more thing, she had to tell him one more thing. "Gonna keep that name. I like it."

He didn't answer right away and Kat thought he might be gone. Then the connection hissed. "Good," he said. Then he was gone.

She thrashed. Kicked uselessly at the walls, feet slowed and stalled by invisible mud, and pounded her fists with bruising force against a material that sucked all the power from her strikes. Not being able to bloody her knuckles and stub her toes angered her; she raged against the dumb machine.

_It's not fair!_

Grief turned her into a child, one that hadn't been taken on a special overnight hike, one who didn't have a friend to call her Sunshine and make her smile and feel special. Interesting. Warm and safe. Kat threw herself back and forth against the small confines of her prison and she wept, cried with gut-wrenching sobs that scoured her throat and left her nose blocked and her head pounding.

Finally, exhausted by fear and sorrow, she subsided against the forgiving barrier and wept quietly until her bruised self sought the sanctuary of sleep.

When she woke, the stink of sweat and vomit assailed her nostrils, forgotten and refreshed. The salt of her tears still pulled lightly at her cheeks. Her heart ached. She hadn't been in love with Finch, but she had loved him in a way. He'd been her friend and he'd been a good and decent man. And she hadn't even seen him die, had only heard his last gasp as his scrubber gave out and his suit became a quiet tomb. She hadn't been able to hold his hand.

_Not fair._

Life wasn't fucking fair. None of it. She knew that.

Though sour, the air inside her helmet continued to sustain her, and her suit reported no lack of quality or quantity. Her cheeks itched. Her ear did not. The invisible bubble around her was… Fuck, it was alive. Had to be. Nothing else could explain how the air inside remained viable after six hours.

Why hadn't Finch had a bubble?

"Can you hear me?"

Something brushed her cheek. Shit, had the heat exchanger started to fritz? Was the warm caress on her cheek a breath of hot air that spelled the beginning of the end? Again? Panic nudged aside stiff grief, not making her more pliable, but able to function in a jerky, automatic sort of way. Suit diagnostics became a tool in her new religion. She cycled through report after report—her health, containment, oxygen, function, trajectory—and let the readouts streaming across the HUD absorb her. Calm her. She existed in an agony of aggrieved silence until she thought of another diagnostic routine.

Then, another caress against her cheek. Surely she imagined it.

"Can you talk?"

She'd seen a vid once, about a woman who got stranded on a planet. The crash of her ship had been pretty spectacular, the fact of her survival requiring some serious suspension of disbelief. The story that unfolded afterwards, though, her tracking down the packages that rained across the planet's surface and using each found object as an innovative tool for survival, had been inspiring. Her only friend had been a limited VI she retrieved from the ship's computer and installed on her omni-tool.

The porn version of the vid—every good vid spawned cheap knock-offs and pornos—had been pretty funny.

Now, though, Kat couldn't even manage the ghost of a smile. Her cheeks felt both stiff and numb as she talked to her bubble. It had some rudimentary intelligence, probably dumb, and so became her only companion. She figured being somewhat insane by the time she died (or got rescued) was a given, so why not try and talk to the insane bubble that had saved her, only to imprison her in a virtual graveyard?

"Can we move?"

She rolled to the side and tried to fall against the side of the bubble. Space pock-marked with the detritus of her career wheeled overhead in a slow and graceful arc. She floated into the forgiving material of the barrier, only a hair's breadth of panic now as she seemingly fell toward nothing and landed against something. The bubble didn't move.

Kat appealed to its logic, knowing she probably spoke for her own benefit. "Why save me only to let me die?" _Makes no fucking sense. _She looked down at the small blob of asteroid hung in space below her. "I'm so fucked."

Too tired and sad to fight her own fate, Kat leaned against the forgiving skin of nothing and stared out at nothing.


	9. nine

nine

_"She has a point."_

Ignoring the kernel, again, he considered the situation. The entity continued to exist, laced together over a field of debris by a web that thrived in vacuum and regenerated as the heat of its birth slowly dissipated. It was growing. It was making decisions. Unseen by human eyes, dark tendrils of matter snaked through the cold space.

He saw them. Black on black. He marked the density of something moving through nothing.

The woman's emotions battered at the skin of him. Acting independently, the mote of self attempted to calm her. He tried to ignore them both, his attention held by the slow assembly of matter. Her intermittent panic reminded him of what panic felt like, though. If he had a pulse, it would skip. His breath would hitch. That buzz would be blood rushing, hissing, tingling. The bitter sting of adrenaline. An unknown entity slowly unfolded in front of him. He knew that if she knew, if she could see, her heart would stop.

The fear of darkness was primal. The fear of dark on dark, of something moving through that blankness, forming, growing, whispering…

_This_ had drawn him here.

Purpose clarified, he talked to himself.

_"I'm here for this."_

_"I thought we had already clarified that. What are we going to do about Sunshine?"_

_Sunshine._

Sympathy plucked unstrung tendons. Lashes that no longer existed swept phantom cheeks. A face formed of memory swam across the eye of his mind; brown eyes, large and deeply absorbing. The shadow of line and lash expressive, even when purposely hard and blank. Windows to a soul that wanted to be seen. Lips, full and red. Always so red. Always. He remembered the way they moved, the elasticity of that mouth. From a tight purse to flat line to up-tilted corners of a wide, wide smile.

Her laugh. He remembered her laugh. The way her eyes flashed like mirrors, the way she invited…no, dared him to share a joke.

A joke.

_"I remember her."_

_"We loved her."_

The twist of sympathy became a pain as deep and profound as space.

_"We don't have time for this."_

And that was why he didn't remember, himself or her. Because he no longer existed and neither did she. What they had—_had_ had—couldn't be. They were dead and he didn't have the time to mourn, just as he'd never had the time to properly appreciate what he'd had.


	10. ten

ten

Something moved outside the bubble. Used to the motion-sucking properties of the invisible membrane, Kat shifted slowly and methodically and until she faced outward, hands braced against the darkness of space. Her gaze roved over the twisted and shattered wreckage of the Bataille, looking for pieces that tumbled faster or fell away from the scattered ring. Looking for the movement that had caught her attention.

Grey eyes flicking sideways, she fixed her stare on a clump of wire, imagining she'd seen a spark. Then she glanced up and away, distracted by the awkward dangle of a bent strut. A vague shadow on a smooth section of wall pulled her gaze next. The deeper shadow of a jagged scar drifted into the periphery of her vision, dark and foreboding. And then, there, right there, something moved, out of sync with the ballet of detritus spiraling slowly around her.

Kat stared into space and waited for it to happen again, dread creeping down her spine. Her lower back cramped and tension wrapped around her belly. Her stomach clenched. Hunger and trepidation. Her tongue felt like sandpaper as it shifted across parched lips. Her head ached in a slow, steady pulse.

Something flicked up and then glided over the top of a ruined wall, slithering effortlessly across the cracked edge, expanding, thickening…

She tasted blood, hers, and then her tongue throbbed. She'd bitten it. The meagre drop of metallic liquid teased her dry throat. "What the fuck," she croaked.

The horror story had another chapter; more pages before those final two words. She watched, terror defined by the taste of her blood, as black fingers wrapped piece after piece of wreckage. The tendrils lengthened and multiplied exponentially. Her fright grew accordingly.

Smacking her fist against the barrier took more effort than before. She'd rested, but the oblivion of sleep did not refresh her, feed her. Every time she opened her eyes, Kat felt closer to the end, even though she seemed frozen in a terrible moment. Time lost all meaning and the bright columns of figures scrolling across the HUD no longer comforted her.

Ten hours had passed since the panel had shocked her. The small ache at the back of her skull had been eclipsed by larger wounds. Things she barely understood, thoughts she didn't want to have.

"Let me out, please. Or take me away from here. Fuck. I don't want to be…"

She couldn't voice the awful thought, but it was there, in her mind. That thing, those black tentacles creeping across the broken pieces of the _Bataille_, was advancing toward her. Kat didn't credit herself with a lot of imagination. She had the mind of an engineer, logical and often swayed by superior thought. She saw connections. She knew how to trace circuits, seen and unseen, and extrapolate a course and result. She knew the blackness slowly consuming pieces of the ship, the path of it marked by what it covered, was moving toward her. The bubble had not saved her, it had preserved her. Held her for a fate worse than death.

Shaking off fatigue and the heavy drag of inevitability, Kat grasped at the small, nearly dead ember of fury that still sparked deep in her gut. Gathering it, she pushed out against the barrier, heedless of the suck against her hands and feet. She screamed until her throat burned and the pain flared white behind closed lids. Her arms and legs cramped, the small exercise of struggling against the bubble not enough to keep them limber. Hunger and thirst worked against her. Grief tugged her sideways and the stark realization she was as effective as a fly in amber robbed the last of her strength.

Kat folded her legs and drifted to the bottom of her prison. She leaned back into the cushion of nothingness and closed her eyes against the strobe of purple and black as her head throbbed, pain screwing into her temples and shooting down her neck. Pins and needles pricked her arms and legs. The deep stab of fear turned her heart into a ticking time bomb. Breath misted against the film of her helmet, vile and putrid. The stink of sweat seemed almost pleasant besides. The sharper tang of urine reminded her she'd fulfilled a much earlier promise. Her skin-suit didn't recycle waste, only air and only for a short time.

She reached up to tap the button at her collar, the one that would release the helmet and expose her to the atmosphere of the bubble. Her gloved finger grazed the stud and then, a defiant smirk curving chapped lips, she double tapped. The helmet shimmered and dissipated, the soft echo of a pop bouncing from the walls of her prison. Almost disappointed to find her eyeballs didn't instantly boil and explode, Kat breathed and hiccupped into incongruously sweet air. She sniffled and swiped at her nose with her gloved wrist. The blue-brown glow of her omni-tool lit the streak of snot. She smelled vomit again, and remembered she'd used that wrist to clean her chin. Before.

"I'm a fucking mess, Finch."

The stupid dumb bubble hadn't responded, and any caress of her cheek had to have been imagined. She'd been wearing a fucking helmet. She was trapped. Bait or part of something—_Oh, God_—that she didn't even want to think about. Did Jormangund send her out here for this? She'd done the requisite research, learned enough of the right words to snag the contract, but she hadn't really looked into the company's business. Wasn't her business. They needed a pair of merc engineers to repair panels on a derelict tub. It wasn't a glamorous assignment and the pay hadn't seemed outrageous, suspicious. There were rumours, though, about their work with alien technology.

_Is that what this is? A grand experiment?_

"Pay is not fucking good enough!" The walls of her prison absorbed her voice in much the same way as her flying fists and boots. Hot tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. Kat blinked and sniffed. "Man, I never used to be such a cry baby." The soft admonishment seemed to unblock the dam and tears spilled from her eyes quicker than she could wipe them.

Her shoulders shook with quiet sobs. She felt weighed down by indecision and thought. Through the mist of her self-indulgent fit, she finally understood why tears were considered a sign of weakness. She didn't even have the energy to lift her hand to swipe at her cheeks. Not anymore. Hell, she almost welcomed the approach of death. Not the fucking black tentacles of doom, she couldn't welcome those. But the after. The sweet oblivion. It would be a release from uncertainty and sorrow. A respite.

"I've had a good life."

At thirty-two, she'd only just stopped being young, even though youth and vitality still infused her limbs (usually). She had a place, an apartment she'd paid for. On Earth. London. She couldn't say what had drawn her to the city, not exactly, but suspected it had to do with the fact it had been rebuilt, like, a dozen times. It was resilient, a constant work in progress, a symbol of humanity. She didn't buy into the whole human superiority thing. But she liked being human and a woman and thirty-two and the owner of a really fucking nice two bedroom flat, as the Londoners called it, on the seventy-sixth floor of Victory Towers.

She didn't have a spouse or any kids; hadn't wanted the complication. Now, she felt torn between a need she'd never really had and relief she wouldn't be leaving anyone behind.

Kat found the energy to wipe her nose and then let her hand flop to the floor beside her. Her fingers tangled in the tools tucked inside her belt and she looked down. Even as she considered the collection—small combination laser torch/solder, pattern disrupter, and good, old-fashioned knife, she knew none of them would penetrate the barrier.

She'd be the galaxy's biggest damned fool if she didn't try them, though.

Fucking invisible piece of shit between her and the galactic octopus of doom didn't even smoke when she pointed the torch at it. The disruptor failed, too. Nothing disrupted. In fact, the small burst of energy looked as if it had been interrupted.

She dropped back to the 'floor', legs splayed across the round metre of space she had all to herself. All. To. Herself. The disrupter rested against her thigh, her fingers still loosely wrapped around the handle. She swiped her index finger over the trigger, then thumbed the safety forward. The stylised dragon etched into the ceramic stock drew her eye. It was a Jormangund weapon. Not their best, not even their tenth best. It didn't fire torpedoes the size of bullets that could punch a hole in the side of a frigate like the _Bataille_. But, it would put a neat hole between her eyes.

Slowly, Kat turned the weapon on herself. A fatalistic sort of calm swept through her as the dark, unwinking eye at the end of the barrel lined up with her nose. She tilted it back a bit, raising the aim to her forehead. There, she hesitated, thumb resting against the safety. She'd seen what a disrupter round did to human flesh; there was always work for a merc engineer with one of the hundred or so private armies strung across the galaxy. Not her favourite contracts. She only took 'em when she needed the money and never re-upped. But she'd used a weapon, dodged enemy fire and dragged a screaming kid away from the line. She'd watched heads explode like ripe melons. The weird, ripple effect of a disrupter against skin was somehow worse. And what was left behind? Might as well be dead, man.

Kat looked outside at the advancing tide of black. Then, drawing in a steady breath—almost steady—she thumbed off the safety and looked back down at a more immediate death. One of her own damned choosing.


	11. eleven

eleven

He could do anything in an instant. Not a human instant, a galactic instant. Thought did not have to coalesce and inform each decision. He simply reacted to certain stimulus. He was… He had been a soldier. He had been trained not to think, or to think without thinking. To think, but not think. Not to think.

_"For someone who doesn't think, we're sure doing a lot of thinking today."_

Looking inside the vastness of self, he searched for the annoying mote of awareness that heckled him.

_"It's your fault,"_ he said. _"I functioned as I was supposed to for two hundred years before you whispered in my ear."_

_"We don't have ears."_

Not anymore.

_"Just stop, why don't you? I need to think."_

He'd frozen Kat. He hadn't had to think about that. In the instant her finger touched the trigger of the disrupter, he'd slowed time inside the bubble. The beam from the disrupter had only just illuminated the end of the barrel. He could turn it aside at his leisure.

But should he?

_"Yes, we should."_

The black tendrils had consumed Finch. The dead engineer had provided something more than matter to hulking creature slowly blotting out the light of the distant sun. Something had shifted inside it. A ripple of something not unlike consciousness. Preserved inside his suit, Finch had delivered a very specific pattern into the web: awareness. The black horror had none of his personality, only the ability to think beyond the rudimentary connection of circuitry.

What would happen when it absorbed Kat? Curiosity encouraged disparate thought. Compassion, remembered as the barrage of Kat's emotions flowed through his skin, the part of his being he'd wrapped around her, determined he should not speculate. That he should carry her away. Protect her, save her. Ensure a woman with the moniker 'Sunshine' lived to remember him, even if she didn't know him.

But was it his place to interfere? It was the ultimate question and it caused a hiccup. If he was a machine, it became the logic problem that derailed his processes. It was the variance, the infinitesimal margin of error that passed unnoticed until the remainders added up to a whole number. He had stalled.

Saving her would be a human impulse.

Ending the war with the Reapers had been a human impulse; delivering himself to the cosmos, plunging his hands into blue fire, screaming as light disassembled his body, had not. He hadn't wanted to die. He hadn't wanted to choose exile, godhood, the preservation of all rather than the destruction of half.

So, he'd chosen life. He'd chosen to exist.

After fighting for fourteen years, he'd chosen peace. And he'd made himself the arbiter of it. The overseer.

Was it his place to destroy this new intelligence?

Was it his place to save one woman, to whom he had no connection outside a sympathetic twinge?

He recalled the feel of having a throat as the memory of a primal cry, a scream, tickled his being. He remembered the burden of death as he dragged himself toward the blue light, as he made his choice and threw himself into it. He remembered how to _feel_ as he nudged the disrupter beam aside and allowed it to pierce his own skin, the bubble he'd formed around Kat. It _burned_. Could nothingness gasp? Could he feel pain? Or did he only imagine the anguish. Did he already feel regret as his humanity came to the fore and he exercised it, decisively. As the selfish impulse that had driven him into the blue directed him to patch the tear in his skin, sealing Kat in and the unknown out, assuaging the small burn of _pain_.

What of the anger, the small spark of rage that ignited within as it all came down to his choice again.

_Why me? _

As he contracted, pulling Kat closer to his self—as he retreated, falling away from the disappearing debris of the _Bataille_ and toward the planetoid tumbling slowly below them, he asked the question again: Why him?

Why had the fate of the galaxy been thrust into the hands of one man?

The answer didn't come because he'd always known it.

He had chosen this. All of it. He'd _chosen_ it.


	12. twelve

twelve

Kat's scream caught in her throat, a razor blade of fear, as the disrupter kicked against her hand and froze. An instant later, a hole appeared in the invisible barrier. Time stretched to an implausible degree. Breath touched her cracked lips like a gentle finger. A tear nestled in the crease at the side of her nose. Her heart paused in the middle of a beat. And for that single, glorious instant, she felt no pain. The pause caught her between agonies. She felt light, free, and yet cheated. She knew the pain would return, and that every breath would hurt her lips, throat and chest. She knew her belly would cramp again and that outside her prison, black legs of horror would soon strangle her.

Then the bead of air at her lips advanced, the hole sealed and the galaxy rolled. Time snapped forward and Kat understood she had rolled. Her prison was on the move, down and away from the path of those hungry tendrils.

The sound of her scream startled Kat as her throat opened and it ripped free. The bubble absorbed it, truncating the enunciation of her terror, making a mockery of it. She plunged through the remaining wreckage, her course jerky as she rode over small obstacles and dodged large ones. She waited for a beam to wrap around her, killing her, and watched, amazed as it floated away. She surfed over a torn section of wall. Then they were free.

They.

Bile burned in her throat as she accepted the fact of the bubble's sentience. The moment of reaction had not been random. She had been about to kill herself, ending the experiment. But instead of feeding her to the black tentacles, her prison sped her away.

Rocky grew large, the perihelion brightening until they dropped behind and the dense object blotted out all light. A new fear clawed its way free of her belly. They were rushing toward the dark side of the asteroid. Was that were the thing had come from? The black creature that seemed intent on eating the _Bataille_?

Questions continued to pepper her thoughts like space dust bouncing off her bubble. Had the creature been down there the whole time, waiting for the explosion? Had the heat signature drawn it? Was that why Jormangund had advised them not to attempt repairing life support? Why they had subsisted in small sections of the ship?

She ran a shaky hand over her short hair, now dried into stiff spikes. The familiar prickle against her fingers soothed until she encountered the lump on the back of her head.

Was there a secret installation on the asteroid? The base of a cult, or a cache of fucking mad scientists who dabbled in dark matter?

"Hey!"

She smacked a hand against the barrier and gasped as her palm bounced away. Sense quickly determined she should not try to pierce the newly rigid skin while her helmet remained a memory of dissipated eezo. And, what the hell would she do after she won free? Tumble through space until she joined Finch in the vast graveyard of space? Quickly, she thumbed the helmet tab. While the skin of eezo reformed around her head, she checked her gloves—a useless exercise as her suit would report any faults, but she needed something to do, something other watch dust flare around her in a bright orange haze.

Her weird-ass entry vehicle began bouncing against the gasses that drifted close to the surface of the asteroid. Her suit sealed with a quiet ping and friendly green light. She glanced outside the blur of gas and heat surrounding her and then yelped as she punched through the turbulence and began tumbling toward the rocky surface. Kat gaped as she calculated the speed with which she traveled. Her brain grappled with factors like g-forces and inertia, shielding and radiation.

Why wasn't she a smear on the substance of the bubble? A puddle on the floor?

God, was she dead already?

"Hey!" Kat called out again as she jounced around. "Where are we going?"

_Stupid fucking question, Sunshine_. They were going down _there_. But to what end? A hiccup caught painfully in her throat. Kat swallowed the leftover lump. Chin dipping, she fought the urge to sag in place, exhausted. She had been grappling with the unknown for too long. Afraid, for too long.

The disrupter rested between her feet, trapped by her heavy boots. Reaching for it, Kat curled her fingers around the handle. The weapon inferred no extra sense of strength or determination, but she gripped it anyway. The desire to end it all still beckoned, a small flash like the slow green blink of suit integrity. But her curiosity won out for the moment.

Her ear itched again and then something warm caressed her cheek. Man, she was so tired. So fucking tired. The urge to lean into the draft of warm, scrubbed air beckoned. To pretend it was a hand. Maybe she would do that. Just pretend. Sail toward her end, cheek cupped by a fantasy. She could pretend it was Finch's hand. Big, friendly Finch.

Eyes squeezing shut, Kat allowed herself to list sideways until her helmet bounced gently against the side of her prison. Warmth spread across her cheek and she shuddered, wondering if her imagination had provided it, or if her suit had finally decided to malfunction. She didn't open her eyes to check the HUD. She didn't care. If this was the end, she'd go down wrapped in the embrace of imaginary-Finch.

A buzz tickled her ear. Her brow wrinkled. Was that—

"Saaffe."

No, it couldn't be a word. Her scrubber was fucked up. Hissing air could sound like anything. She'd be thinking her suit whispered something about spicy noodles next.

"Saaffe."

Kat opened her eyes. A fatigued throb of panic surged through her veins, oily and sluggish. Her suit blinked green, so…

"So, I'm imagining whispers now."

"No."

She smacked her gloved hands to the outside of her helmet, gloves flaring against the blue field, one disrupter shaped. Kat pulled the weapon away from her head and checked the safety. It was on. Had she done that? She couldn't remember.

Outside the bubble, the surface of the asteroid rushed up to meet her. From orbit, it appeared brown on brown. Darker in places, but still brown. Sometimes a swirl of noxious gas (also brown), hid the darker brown. Here, on the dark side, it was black on black. The sensation of falling swept through her, spiking the lethargic note of her pulse. A brown-blue glow spread through the darkness, outlining rocks piled on top of rocks and it took Kat a panicked moment to figure out the glow came from her; her tools and helmet, the subtle lines of blue piped along the arms and legs of her suit, the magnetic lock of her boots, armed and ready to grip.

She braced for an impact that never occurred. Instead, the bubble swept her into the mouth of a small crater and along a tunnel that seemed sized to accommodate a woman in a mysterious bubble of whateverthefuck. The lights of her suit flashed along the walls, rippling like echoes of water. Then she tipped down and fell again, blackness swallowing her over and over as she barreled through a wormhole in the rock. After she remembered to breathe, Kat counted each inhale, seeking a calm she may never use if this was the end. Hope honed the dull edge of fatalistic thought, however. She'd nearly ended how many times now?

Then she landed.

And the fucking weird substance that had held her trapped for hour after terrifying hour, pulled away from her gloves and boots.

Kat fell again, this time onto the rocky floor of the cavern. Her helmet glanced gently off a small outcropping. Her suited body fared less well. Something dug into her hip and her elbow cracked against a rock. She hadn't thought to activate her shield; hell, she hadn't expected to land anywhere, really.


	13. thirteen

thirteen

_ "Now what?"_

_"I do not know."_

Why had he brought her here, to a cavern of rock inside a bigger rock that would not sustain her for long? He could recycle her air indefinitely. He might even be able to extract moisture from some of the gasses and pipe it into her suit. Trace elements might nurture her flesh for a short while. He could do nothing to properly slake her thirst, though, or quiet the rumble of her belly.

Confused by the seeming whim that had driven his actions, he withdrew from her, the barrier expanding to fit the cavern, sealing it as effectively as her helmet fused with her suit. He thought about trying to communicate again, but despite being able to converse with himself, actual words were hard. He had no tongue; he could only sigh and chop at the air to produce a short grunt.

Her ears. If he could manipulate the air over her eardrums correctly, cause the delicate protuberances to vibrate in the correct order, she might 'hear' him. He tried a simple word first, her name.

"Kaaaaattt."

Her head snapped up, grey eyes wide in the reflected light.

"Safe," he said, uttering his most practiced sound.

"Who the fuck are you?" she answered.

_"I don't know."_ His name still escaped memory. A sigh, a sound like the ocean. One that began like sunshine and ended in death.

"Shh," he tried.

"Don't shush me, I'm in hell! I'm in the belly of some fucking rock and the giant octopus of doom could be out there looking for me. I need answers!"

Her head whipped back and forth, the glow of her helmet bouncing off the walls of the cavern. The glint of his skin looked like mica buried in the rock. Did she understand he still held her?

_"She doesn't even understand what you are."_

The mote of self had returned, and, as always, it heckled.

_"I don't understand what I am. I need a name. She will fear me less if I have a name."_

_"You really have forgotten how to be human, haven't you?_

_No._

He remembered fear and pain and compassion and love. What else was there?

Kat flinched and swiped at her helmet. "Is that you?" she asked. "What the fuck is going on?" She raised the disrupter again, the short barrel aimed roughly at the bubble of eezo protecting her head. "Was it you who stopped me from scrambling my brain? I still have this weapon! Can you see it? Can you see me? What the fuck are you?"

Her voice rose with panic and he could feel the corresponding leap of her pulse, sense the way her heart slammed against her ribs. If he looked closely, he could see within her flesh, count the beats of that vital organ. He could squeeze her heart if he wanted to, or move the blood through it more quickly or slowly. He could do things without thought, but he could not talk—

Her omni-tool!

A tendril of self dove into the instrument and it immediately glowed with life. Before she could react, he typed: _Am here, cannot talk well_.

She stared open-mouthed at the holographic display wavering above her wrist. "Holy fucking Christ."

_Protect you_, he typed.

Her lips moved soundlessly.

He tried another word: _Sunshine_.

Kat's lower lip tucked beneath her teeth and whitened as she bit down on it. Her gaze never wavered from the display. Then, shoulders hitching upward, she began to shake. He thought she suffered from a fit until her mouth opened and a sob tore free of her throat.


	14. fourteen

fifteen

Kat woke with hunger clawing at her belly. Blinking open eyes crusted with the salt of dried tears, lashes gummy with fatigue and stress, Kat looked sideways at the lower edge of the HUD that hovered inside the skin of her helmet. Twelve hours since she'd been shocked, nearly twenty hours since she'd eaten. Several of the indicators glowed amber instead of green, the dull light anything but soothing. The entity—not the octopus of doom, the other one—had saved her and doomed her. It seemed as confused about their situation as she was. Though, in retrospect, she hadn't given it much chance to explain. She'd pretty much done the incoherent thing after that stupid damned nickname appeared over her wrist, made radiant by the orange glow of her tool's display. Made real, somehow, and so completely tragic.

She'd cried herself to a stupor, imaginary fingers stroking her cheeks, and then she'd drifted to the sound of a soft hum. Had the entity sung to her?

"Hello?" she croaked.

The display above her arm lit up. _Hello._

God, she had so many questions. "Are we stuck here?"

She waited for motes of light to form two letters, each millisecond feeling like a minute.

_No_.

"Then why are we here?" Heh, if that wasn't _the_ question.

_Entity advancing. Must…_ Pulse ticking over more quickly, she waited out a pause. _Interpret._

"Interpret? What the fuck does that mean?"

_Unknown._

What was unknown? The answer to her question, or the nature of the thing swallowing space next to the asteroid.

Kat tried a different tack. "What are you?"

Her skin crawled through the answering pause. Phantom itches had her shrugging and shifting. She'd pissed twice in her suit now, and had sweated into it for close to twenty hours, on shift and off. She'd puked and bitten her tongue. She was a walking biological cocktail of terror and response. And she itched, damn it.

_No name. Used to be a man._

Kat blinked at the letters imprinted in the air over her wrist. Astonishment trickled across her skin like a cool bead of sweat, at once soothing and reigniting the itch.

"Used to be? What happened to you?"

Silence answered her again. Then: _I died._

No kidding. "How?"

_War._

The last human war had been two centuries ago. Since then, they'd been the peacekeepers of the galaxy. Rebuilding cities and squashing rebellion. Arbitrating disputes between fractious neighbours.

"Were you human?"

The oddness of talking to an entity that might not be human, but still identified as male, poked. A thin sliver of fear stabbed through her chest.

_Yes._

"Which war?"

He—the entity had described itself as a man—hesitated again. Kat began to think of the pauses as thoughtful. She hadn't decided if they were sinister, yet.

An answer glowed above her wrist: _The Reaper War._

Ah. Well. Shit. The last war, then, which had ended in a mysterious flare of blue light two hundred and eleven years ago. Toss in a handful of days. Kat wasn't a walking encyclopedia of historical fact, but everyone knew the anniversary of the day the Reapers turned away from Earth and set to repairing the destruction they had caused.

A lot of men died in that war. Women, too. All the races of the galaxy had suffered catastrophic casualties.

"I'm sorry," Kat said, the words rasping uneasily against her dry throat.

A new string of words replaced the last: _I have delivered water to your suit._

Kat angled her chin toward the water tube, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then closed her lips around the soft plastic and sucked. The fluid had no discernible taste. Didn't even carry the slightly odd flavour of plastic. She moaned as it flowed down her throat, soothing and slaking, and shuddered as she felt the cool trickle move through her chest. It might kill her, but fuck if she cared. She'd die almost happy.

_Small nutrients in the water. No food. Sorry. Working on a solution._

"Getting us off this rock would work."

_Not sure I can carry you through a mass relay._

So, the bubble had limits.

Kat looked around her, then, wondering if he was close by, if the bubble had contracted into a smaller…something. "Where are you?"

_Everywhere._

"Not the answer I was looking for," she murmured.

_Around you. Still._

Kat looked up and the walls of the cavern flickered. _Well, what do ya know_. The bubble was still intact. It had just expanded.

"Can I release my helmet?"

_Yes._

She lifted her hand and froze in place as warmth wrapped around her gloved fingers. "Is that you?"

_Yes. _A pause, then:_ Trying to help._

"I can push the button."

_Okay._

The single word pulled a giggle from her throat. The entity had said something so unutterably human and in doing so, had become less alien. And it had tried to help her. He. He had tried to help her. He had pulled her away from that thing in space, buried her somewhere inside Rocky and had provided water with a small amount of sustenance.

Soft air currents caressed her newly exposed cheeks. Kat sighed and closed her eyes. She felt tired again. It was hunger, she knew, and her body racing to collect what it could from the small amount of water. Residual stress would also slow her down.

God, what she wouldn't give for a bath. Hell, even a sonic scrub would do.

"Any word on when we'll get out of here?" They were in this together, right?

Did he understand how much more confident and hopeful she felt with someone to talk to?

_Working. _

"Want me to stop talking so you can do…whatever?"

A pause, then: _No_.

"You sure about that?"

_Can do both at the same time. _Slowly, more words rolled out of the air: _Can do many things at once. Be anywhere, see and hear the much of the galaxy. _

"But you can't take me with you."

_No_. Then: _Wish I could_.

The words plucked something in the centre of her chest. Anxiety still coursed through her limbs, a dull burn that could easily be confused with fatigue. Even after her rescue and the water and the air and the effort to communicate, she remained wary. She had to for reasons she could not articulate. But that simple phrase, the fact he had used the word 'wish', stirred another connection. He cared. He wanted to save her. He was sad…no, disturbed that he could not, not beyond carrying her away from the more immediate danger.

"You'll figure something out," she said, vaguely amused by the encouraging note in her voice.

_Will try_, he answered.


	15. fifteen

fifteen

The black tentacles had finished eating the _Bataille_. The entity crawled through space, moving effortlessly through vacuum, and continued to consume anything it came into contact with. Dust, pockets of radiation, microorganisms, poisons; all provided sustenance. It was as awesome and it was frightening. Gruesome and beautiful.

_"If we don't kill it soon, it will eat the asteroid."_

The same paradox of thought held him fast.

_"How do I render it inert?"_

_"You kill it."_

_"It's not my place—"_

_"None of it is,"_ the kernel pointed out, bringing the argument back around. _"Let's drive it into the sun."_

_"What if it eats the sun?"_

He looked into the pale glow of the system's energetic blue star. Herschel. He remembered the name of the star, but not his own. Why? He remembered details of the war, mostly theoretical, but not his own life. Why?

_"Because we're not supposed to be a person. A he. A man who was."_

_"Why should I kill this thing?"_

He had watched an asteroid smack into a planet, killing half the indigenous life. A form of mould that had learned to bond with its neighbours. In a hundred thousand years, it might walk on a leg or two or three. He had seen pirates board a freighter and toss hapless merchant marines out an airlock, the bodies spinning away like motes of dust. The explosion of a power station charged with an exotic new element had drawn his attention from half a galaxy away. Near instantaneous travel meant he had arrived in time to watch the cloud of hot radiation burn an almost perfect circle on the planet surface, one visible from orbit. Within, buildings, skyways and parks were fused together into a glistening black wasteland. Disease ravaged populations and a slow leak in containment of hazardous waste stored deep underground was slowly killing the people ploughing newly terraformed fields above. At any moment, a volcano might erupt, a wave might sweep across an unsuspecting continent, a solar flare might ensnare a passing ship or fry one face of a planet…

_"I think we're losing perspective, here."_

If he'd a head, it would be bent from shoulders bowed beneath the weight of the galaxy. His chin would touch his chest.

_"I don't think it's my job to decide who lives and who dies."_

_"Bit late for that."_

An imagined glance took in the asteroid below. He was still inside the cavern with the woman he had rescued. Kat. _Sunshine_. He was also outside. At last count, he could be in twenty-five different places at once, with varying levels of awareness. Now, he was in three, more or less.

Gathering substance, he began probing the creature expanding across the quiet system. He wrapped a portion of it in a bubble of self, noting it did not complain when separated from its whole. The thumb shaped piece of blackness merely rested inside the invisible containment field while the rest of the being continued on its merry way.

He had a sample which he knew how to feed. His sample did not seem intent on escaping its prison.

_"I was drawn here for a reason,"_ he stated as he thinned and expanded, the shape of him—which wasn't a shape or even a 'him'—reaching out across the backdrop of stars so that he began to surround the dark creature. _"I was compelled. Therefore I conclude I am to act."_

Uncertainty rippled through his consciousness as he acted according to intent, but he continued to surround the writhing blackness of recently born creature. When he had it seventy-three percent contained, it reacted.


	16. sixteen

sixteen

"This barrier you formed around me…" Kat's voice carried a musing tone. "It's impenetrable. I can't stick my hands and feet through it and somehow you're able to exchange the air inside. Can't you carry me through a mass relay in one of these bubbles?"

Seriously, she couldn't believe she'd asked the question. On the other hand, she was an engineer. It was her job to find solutions to problems. She preferred the electronic kind, remapping circuits for fun and profit, but she could turn her attention to matters of, say, life and death when required.

_Theoretically_, the entity replied, the slow appearance of each letter lending a pensive nature to the word.

"What were you, before?"

_A man._

"No, I mean, what did you do, what was your job?"

A pause, then: _A soldier_. After another pause a question mark appeared at the end.

He didn't know? How the fuck… Scratch that. He didn't even know his name, so it stood to reason he couldn't remember much else.

"You fought in the war, then."

_Yes._

Poor chump could have been a fucking baker forced to fight with a wooden spoon, which would hardly be effective against…what were they called, Collectors? No, Banshees? The foot soldiers. Husks? She'd seen enough horror vids with husks to give her nightmares for two lifetimes.

Words were popping into being over her wrist. _I saw the Reapers invade Earth. I was there at the beginning and the end. _

A soldier, then. How had he gotten caught up in whatevertheshit he was now? Lips twisting, Kat thought about the question a moment, then asked it. "So, how did you end up, ah, like… I don't know what the fuck you are." Blonde brows dipped down and together. "Well, you're kinda like that black thing out there only a whole lot less scary now that you're talking."

Yeah, she'd just said that.

_I had to end the war._

Well, that clarified everything. "Right. So you…?"

A full minute passed before orange letters began to form. _I was the only one left, up there. I had to make a choice. I chose this._

"Up where?"

_The Crucible._

A shiver rattled her spine. That was the Prothean device, the thing that had ended the war. _Just as he said, Sunshine_. Fuck, she needed to stop thinking that name. Made her think of Finch and Finch was gone, probably kibble in the belly of the beast and...

Kat pressed a gloved hand to her lips, stifling something that could have been a whimper or a sob. Her emotional state confused her, somewhat. She hadn't been in the habit of crying after sappy vids or keeping in touch with old fuck buddies or…just plain being sentimental. _I'm tired_. And stressed.

She wrenched her thoughts back to the conversation, which wouldn't solve the problem of how she got from this ball of rock to her cozy couch in London, but was interesting, nonetheless.

So, he'd been a part of the team that had taken the Crucible. Wait, only two men had made it up there at the end of the shit. Kat swallowed. "Only two men made it inside the Crucible thing."

_I know_, he answered. _One of them was me._

Holy fuck.

"So, you're Anderson or Shepard."

Silence greeted her. It was deep and profound, as if his presence had withdrawn from the cavern. Nervously, Kat looked toward the closest wall, for the telltale glow of substance that blanketed the perimeter. A faint sheen winked back at her.

"Hello?"


	17. seventeen

seventeen

"So, you're Anderson or Shepard."

The sound of the ocean hissed and swelled into a great sigh before crashing onto the beach of memory.

Shhhhhhhhhhhepard.

He was Shepard.

The thin skin of nothing that slowly enclosed the struggling entity strung across space, the protective bubble holding Kat captive, the kernel of self in a hidden section of the Citadel, the being who had existed without purpose for two hundred years, the man who had plunged his hands into two columns of blue fire to end a war. The man who had made a choice, who had had to make so many damned choices; who had been so bone-achingly tired. All but dead. Who had been called upon to make one final sacrifice and had done it, willingly, knowing his trip up the pipe had been made on a one way ticket.

The man who had watched Anderson die, who had been powerless to save his friend at the last.

The sensation of pain rippled through him, not only the memory of his death, but all the pain of before. Riding the wave of a Reaper beam, fighting his way to that point. Being broken, broken and broken again. The bodies and the gore. The stink of blood and burnt flesh, hot metal and decay. Death. He could hear a scream, a million screams, and the low, ominous rumble of war.

And he could hear his name, over and over, as they called on him to fight, to keep fighting, to hold it together, to do what no one else could do, or wanted to do.

Shepard.

Emotion rolled through him, touching off the points of remembrance. He quaked and the asteroid trembled beneath him. Tendrils of black battered against his skin, seeking to poke holes in him, and Kat rolled across the floor of the cavern, crying out as her arm struck an outcropping of rock. He pushed back, thickened the substance of his self enough to cushion her bone, but she would still bruise.

His sense of loss was so great, he thought he might fall through the bottom of the galaxy. A thirst for vengeance took away the breath he did not have, though he could not pinpoint the target. Anger rocked him.

He wanted to scream, but he had no voice. He wanted to withdraw, make himself into a pebble that might be crushed beneath the weight of a million million deaths, the sound of his memories, but he could not. He existed, and while he had consciousness, he had to fight.

He was a soldier.

He was Shepard.


	18. eighteen

eighteen

Rubbing her bruised wrist, Kat looked around the cavern, eyes flicking back and forth as she studied the ceiling and walls, the vague illumination of her tool and suit not enough to highlight the almighty pile of rock that would end it all. Would the barrier save her? Had the asteroid cracked? Oh, God. Had the creature outside started eating Rocky?

She pushed up to a sitting position and curled her lips toward the drinking tube. Sucked a bit of liquid into her mouth and swallowed. The water trickled down her insides, cool and wet. Her stomach stretched and growled.

"What's happening?" she ventured, her newly wetted throat capable of speech once more.

He had been curiously silent through the small quake, which sort of made sense. He probably had a hundred other things to do, being everywhere at once and all.

Was he really Anderson or Shepard? The idea he might be one or the other struck Kat with awe. They were men of legend, both. They and the entire crew of the Normandy. The Reaper War had raised countless heroes, most of them dead, and had changed the nature of the galaxy. People still fought, racial tension still snapped and flared, but there was a bigger bad out there and they all knew it. Sorta put shit in perspective.

_Am attempting to contain the entity. _

Attempting to. That didn't sound good. "Is it fighting you?" Did she really want the answer to that question?

_In a manner of speaking._

"Hey, um, this might be a bad time, but did either of those names ring a bell?"

Another paused, then: _Yes. Both of them_.

"So, you're one of them?"

_I was Shepard._

Wow.

Kat rubbed at her head, gloved fingers whispering through her dirty hair. She had got in the habit of keeping it short when she needed to wear an envirosuit day in, day out. No hair to tickle the back of her neck, no sweaty strands to cling to her cheeks, stuck somewhere that itched or just plain annoyed because she couldn't move it. She thought she had the features to pull off the short look, anyway. The boyish cut looked good on her. Made her striking. And there was something about cutting it at the end of a vacation. Watching another version of herself appear in the mirror. The work-self. The tall, badass merc engineer with eyes the colour of stone. She could be intimidating, which came in handy when her teammates got mouthy or grabby.

Shepard wouldn't care what she looked like, though. Hell, he probably didn't even have eyes. Or, a sense of visual acuity, or whatever. He was, well, she didn't know what he was. He was supposed to be dead.

_I cannot believe I am sitting her talking to the greatest hero in the galaxy. _John Shepard_. _

A faint smile crooked her lips as she thought over what she knew of the man, from the history books. He'd been a handsome bastard, that was an agreed upon fact. His methods were often called into question, but the fact he'd pretty much ended the war, done something up there in the Crucible that turned the Reapers into "sowers", sorta cleared the slate. The haters would always hate, but in general, the galaxy loved Shepard and honored his memory, still, two hundred and eleven years after his disappearance.

"They never found you," she said. "Your, ah, body. It was assumed you'd died when you did whatever it was you did that turned the Reapers away."

_I did die. Then. When the Reapers turned away_.

Eyes narrowing, Kat chewed over those words. When the Reapers turned away. There were as many theories as there were planets in the galaxy when it came to interpreting the event that ended the war, the Reapers withdrawing, being corralled by some mysterious force and then set to fix what they'd broken. Many thought it was Shepard, or his ghost. There were a dozen cults dedicated to different incarnations of Shepard after the war.

"Some people think you're a god," she said, her tone conversationally musing.

_What do you think?_ came the unexpected response.

What did she think?

"Ah, well, I'm kinda blown away by the fact I'm even talking to you, for a start." She pressed her lips together and hummed. "No, I don't think you're a god." She didn't have it in her to be a religious nut, she liked all her vices too much. "But you're something extraordinary." Her lips curved. "Most of the histories agree on that point, by the way. You're…you're a hero, John Shepard." She shook her head. "Man, I hope this isn't some weird ass dream. Gonna be so pissed if I wake up and find…"

Her smile dropped away as if small fingers had tugged it from her face.

She would like to wake up and find Finch snoring next to her, as fantastic as it was to be talking with a ghost. With the greatest hero of all time, or the presence who claimed to have been…damn. As great as it was to talk to Shepard, and it had to be him, shit was too freaky otherwise, Kat had a secret person hidden deep inside who liked things to be as they should be. Maybe not so secret. She was an engineer, after all. Finch should be alive, she should be slurping up spicy noodles and tinkering with a pair of gloves, trying to jerry-rig some dumb circuits to imitate the sort of equipment she couldn't afford. Not chatting with the ghost of a hero while the octopus of doom slowly at the universe.

"What's happening outside?"

_Trying to contain the entity._

"What are you?"

Another pause, then: _I don't know_.

"Can it punch through your, ah, skin?" Kat hadn't been able to, but she wasn't some sneaky black shit that had come out of nowhere. "Do you even know what it is?"

_It came from the Bataille. Organic circuitry. _

Cold fingers of dread danced down Kat's spine. Even as she tried to order her thoughts, she felt the tickle of suspicion. Two man team on a quiet project at the arse-end of the galaxy. Enough money to guarantee good techs, not quite enough to arouse suspicion. And they'd used mercs instead of an in-house team. She shook her head and then grabbed at the out cropping beside her, fingers sinking into the oddly cushioned substance of Shepard. Fuck, so weird. Kat blinked slowly until her head stopped spinning. The backlash of too many adrenaline surges, too many surprises, hunger and lack of proper sleep.

Two deep breaths and she was ready to think again. Organic circuitry. Did that mean the thing had a consciousness? Was it an AI or a VI?

"Is it stupid?"

_No._

Fuck.

"Can you, shit, can you kill this thing?"

_Yes. Trying to._

"I don't want to be eaten by the fucking octopus of doom, okay? It's already been a shitty day."

Despite the fear curling in her belly, Kat found a small smile. She was with the John Shepard. Of course he would kill it. That was what he did, right? Kick ass, take names and save the galaxy.


	19. nineteen

nineteen

The entity did not feel fear. It had a rude intelligence; it understood something tried to contain it, but not why. There was no backward movement or retaliation, only methodical probing of the periphery, scout tendrils of black matter sliding and tapping at the edges of the field. Still, it understood enough about its existence to struggle, to demonstrate the fact it did not want to be contained. The substance of it swelled, waves of swirling, writhing black, until the field bulged…and expanded.

_"So, let's get this straight. We've wrapped the Octopus of Doom in a cosmic bubble and now we're going to feed it and watch it grow."_

Shepard felt a sigh roll through his consciousness. Was it him, or the kernel? _"You're back,"_ he said.

_"Never left. Miss me?"_

_"How can I miss myself?"_

_"Missed a good portion of us for over two hundred years. Quite the revelation, there, John Shepard. Hero, traitor, N7 designated Alliance Marine, Cerberus operative—"_

_"Don't need the resume. I remember."_

The kernel snorted, the sound a disturbed structure of consciousness that poked through the confusion regarding every aspect of his existence. He hadn't changed. His mission parameters had not changed. But they never had, had they? He'd been the one to force change, to step outside guidelines and draft new method.

The skin of the containment field continued to stretch. Shepard began the journey toward Herschel. By himself, he could move instantly from point to point, imagine being there and arrive. With cargo, he was somewhat restricted by the laws of physics. He did not understand why that should be; the containment field had no propulsion, no atmosphere. The substance within might as well be weightless, though it had a definite mass. It had a size—ever increasing. It _was_.

_"We weren't an astrophysicist."_

_"Probably just as well."_

Half the stunts he'd performed had been in defiance of any known laws.

_"What are we going to do if it eats the sun?"_

What a question.

_"Maintain containment and carry it to dark space."_

_"Long trip."_

_"But probably necessary."_

The entity might not consciously mean harm, but it did not distinguish between matter. It 'ate' everything it encountered and grew accordingly.

_"It hasn't eaten us."_

No, it had not. In fact, having consumed every speck of dust inside the containment field, it had stopped growing. Shepard checked in on the thumb sized portion he'd cut off earlier and discovered it had also been rendered inert.

He faced another choice. Keep a sample for study, or destroy all of it.

_"Will we name it Black Beauty?"_

_"Shut up."_

He knew himself too well.

The first gusts of solar wind breezed through his existence. The creature inside him reared back, a wave of blackness rolling toward the rear end of the containment field. Stiffened tentacles of dark coloured matter—not dark matter, thank all the stars—poked at him again, stretching portions of his skin to outrageous lengths. Shepard stiffened the substance of his self, pushing the creature back into the centre of the field.

He did not ride the solar waves; he did not surf through the flares and lashing whips of nuclear fire. He barreled toward the middle of the star, encouraged by the restrained panic of the entity.

The ensuing struggle looked like cellular warfare on a grand scale. Two entities, one so light as to be invisible, the other as dark as the space between galaxies, writhed and tangled. The dark creature punched out in a thousand directions at once, desperate to escape the energy of the sun. Shepard blocked every strike, adapted to the strain and continued into the centre of the blue star.

_"Ready?"_

It might have been the first time he addressed himself directly, which marked a turning point, he supposed—in the small corner of self that debated such matters, who was now aware of his existence, properly.

_"Let's do it,"_ he answered himself.

The bubble evaporated, exposing the black creature to the sun.


	20. twenty

twenty

"Is it dead?"

_Uncertain._

Well, that was reassuring. Kat fiddled with the handle of her disrupter and then pointed it toward the dark shaft in the ceiling, the only exit to her rock prison. She understood that one weapon, a disrupter Jormangund considered so insignificant, it handed them out to contractors like party favours, would not stop the black shit from swooping down the chimney of rock and swallowing her. If Shepard's containment field collapsed. But she hated to feel powerless or irrelevant. Outside, Shepard fought a battle against the unknown. Buried deep beneath the surface of the asteroid, Kat did somewhat the same.

Lowering her arm so the disrupter grazed her thigh, Kat paced back and forth, the light of her suit illuminating the floor of the cavern in ghostly blue. She had discovered she could not kick at the small rocks littering the ground. The skin of Shepard's bubble held them as fast as it did her. In a sense. She wondered if she could ask him to move the rocks away from her feet, so she could gain the sense of kicking them, the sense of moving something, of not being inert, but figured he was probably busy, you know, killing the octopus thing.

Growling under her breath, she kicked at the floor, heedless of whether her action might cause him discomfort. He couldn't feel, right?

_I don't know. He probably doesn't, either. _

What would it be like to be a ghost? An all-powerful one? To be made of the substance of the universe, to be able to go anywhere, see anything, do whatever at a thought? It would be like the ultimate dust up, a metaphorical trip through the centre of the galaxy. A high shouldn't last for two hundred years, though. Must get kinda lonely out there with only himself to play with, unless he had a cadre of ghostly friends. Or, fuck, did he chat with the Reapers? They were his, right?

"Are you alone out there, wherever it is you are? Like, do you have anyone to talk to?"

_Alone_, came the answer. _Talk to myself, sometimes_. Then: _Argue with myself, I can be an ass_.

Kat chuckled quietly, and then shook her head, the unreality of her situation, of the identity of the entity behind the glowing orange letters, striking her all over again.

"I'm going to wake up soon," she murmured.

Thankfully, he did not answer the comment with a string of logic.

"Is it dead yet?" Are we there yet?

No answer.

"Shepard?"

_Move against a wall, put your arms over your head. Contracting. Hold tight._

The orange letters pulsed with urgency.

_Oh, fuck. _

Kat dove for the nearest corner. As she rolled into a ball, she felt the first quake rumbling through the asteroid, then the containment field contracted, pressing air against her so that she was trapped in a proper bubble. She opted to squeeze her eyes shut. A braver woman might look death in the eye, but Kat figured she'd be dead either way, so it didn't really matter how she went.

A small flicker of hope beat inside her chest. Shepard would save her. Might be a juvenile thought, but he'd done an all right job so far.

The world—no, the universe shook. Curling tighter, Kat rode out the storm, which was exactly what she supposed it was, a solar storm. Backlash from the thing Shepard had thrown into the sun. The scariest part, she decided, was the fact she couldn't hear what she felt. She could imagine the rumble and groan of stone, the creak and crack, but no sound traveled through the skin of the field protecting her. In fact, but for the sound of her own voice, her coughs, grunts and farts, she'd heard nothing since just before the death of the _Bataille_.

She tipped sideways and rolled along the wall. The field cushioned her journey so that she bounced and glided, and then she became wedged under a shelf of rock. Cracking her eyes open, she looked out to see if the roof of the cavern had collapsed. A teeth-rattling shockwave pulsed through the asteroid and dust danced away from the skin of her bubble. A boulder the size of Finch glanced off the overhang. The ground jerked up and down. Her world danced in silent symphony.

Kat angled her thumb backwards and activated her helmet. It felt like a futile sort of gesture, but it was an action. She'd done something.

Eventually, something like two hundred and eleven fucking years after the quake had begun, the world-tipping motion subsided. The asteroid continued to tremble with aftershocks and atmosphere of the cavern was clogged with dust. Small handfuls of rock rained down across the floor at irregular intervals. Kat remained still until the floor stopped shaking.

She'd bit her tongue again. Her mouth tasted so foul, she didn't even notice the tang of blood until she sipped at the straw, driven by the need to cleanse her throat of imaginary dust. The fluid stung the side of her tongue, the pulse of pain so real and weird. Kat swallowed a whimper. She would not cry over a little cut. Shit, she didn't have enough moisture in her body to give in to tears again.

Dryly, she put a query to Shepard. "Is it over?"

In answer, the field around her expanded, pushing the dusty atmosphere back until she reclaimed half the cavern. Kat pushed up out of her huddle and approached the furthest wall of substance. She placed her hands against the skin and pushed.

"That's…" The haze beyond swirled and cleared to show a pile of grey-blue rock barring the exit. "That's just fucking terrific."


	21. twenty-one

twenty-one

_"Now what are we going to do?"_

It was familiar, this cascade of circumstance that drove action to action, giving no time for reaction or recompense. Hadn't he already spent a lifetime rolling from disaster to disaster?

_"No rest for the wicked."_

_"You're not helping."_

_"Whoever supposed I might?"_

An annoyed grunt passed through his being; the memory of a sound, an allowed reaction to circumstance.

_"We need to carve a new chimney through the rock."_

First, Shepard took the measure of the local space. The gigantic flare reached toward the last planet. If he could wince, he would. He had tried to contain the direction of the energy released by the destruction of the creature. He had aimed for the most desolate corridor. Tungel would have been rocked by quakes. Matol had been brushed by the periphery of the planet wasting wind. Clugon would pass through in four years, unaware of the fact Herschel had even twitched. Clobaka would bear the brunt of it. The nascent terraforming efforts greening one side of the ringed planet would be negated.

_"The thing would have eaten the planet anyway,"_ the kernel of self noted.

Wearily—and fatigue was a new sensation—Shepard agreed. _"Eventually, yes."_

Had he made the wrong choice again? Could he have given the handful of colonists down there a chance to evacuate? Considering the struggle to contain the dark entity, the fight inside the sun, Shepard decided he had not had the time. Kat had accepted his existence, or seemed to have. But she was alone and had seen the evidence of him. Convincing a stranger on the other side of a dumb terminal that he carried a message from the stars would have taken too long...

…and he would have had to expose himself, again.

Shepard had formed the notion his existence should not be made public. It was too bizarre, and he'd never liked talking about himself. Not with the screwed up faces of the press—eyes shining with avarice, mouths set to rip sound bites from his words and set them against a backdrop of misinformation that made him out to be either the greatest hero the galaxy had ever seen, or the worst criminal, the bane of all races.

He had only really talked with one person. Talked, as in shared pieces of himself. And now that he remembered who he was, he remembered who she was, or had been. Why he had taken inadvisable—_to whom?_—action in order to save a woman who loosely resembled her.

Sunshine.

That had been his name for Jack. For the defiant young woman who had become the face of his private war. She had scowled every time he smiled, except when they were alone, skin to skin in the heated and damp afterglow, their faces pressed so close together he could see the smile in her eyes. She had threatened to render him forever childless every time he called her Sunshine. But he'd seen the twitch at one corner of her perfect mouth, the wrinkle that hinted at a smile she tried so hard to hide.

That mouth, those lips.

If he had eyes, he would close them. Shepard imagined the darkness instead so he could indulge in the slideshow memory would play across the blankness inside his lids. Jack actually smiling, pouting, touching her fingers to her lips in a rare gesture of affection. Her eyes flashing with anger, lips twisted, chin raised, her posture forever bold! The woman who trembled in his arms sometimes, then offered an explanation for it, as if she needed to have a reason to be afraid, to let go.

The lines he remembered were her tattoos. He only had an impression of them, though he had spent as much time as he could tracing them, the calloused pad of his finger tip counting scars as well as ink. They were all a part of her; each had a story to tell and she told them all, indiscriminately. She wanted to shock and surprise him. She liked it when his brows drew down low. She'd poke in between, slender digit tap, tapping the front of his skull. Then, when he asked for the next story, she'd say, "You're weird."

Jack had liked that he was weird. Apparently it was kinky.

_"Now I am nothing and everything, a thing that is and isn't." _

And Jack was gone. Long gone.

His grief felt fresh and old. He'd already mourned life and the existence he barely remembered. He'd mourned the fact of the war and his death. A compartment of his self, a separate process that remained voiceless, still marked off a list of losses. He didn't check in with it very often, it was counter-productive. And the losses hadn't been personal; they had been brutal and overwhelming.

"Shepard?"

_Am here_, he typed as he reintegrated with the part of self wrapped loosely around Kat.

"Are you all right?"

Something inside him smiled at the simple query. _Am fine_, he answered.

"What…" Hesitating, she leaned into the wall, braced against one gloved hand that sunk into the skin of him. Shepard imagined he could feel her fingers. "Did the fucking world end?"

_No. Entity destroyed_. Beyond a shadow of doubt—except for the small, inert portion trapped in an airless bubble of himself somewhere on the dark side of the asteroid. _Solar flare pushed through the system._ _Clobaka will…_ How should he put it? _Not fare well._

"Can you warn them? Type a message like you do to me."

_Would you listen to a message carrying no signature, no point of origin, that warned of impending disaster?_

Her throat vibrated with a quiet hum. "No, probably not." Thought lit her features. "What if I send the message?"

_"That could work,"_ the kernel put in.

_"It could."_

_Being recording_, he typed. _I'll prepare the transmission._


	22. twenty-two

twenty-two

"Herald Station, this is M.E. Katrien Niftrik. Formerly of the frigate _Bataille_."

The message continued, following standard protocol. She stated the nature of the disaster, classed the flare and accompanying wind, and included an estimate of how long the colony had before the outer edge of the radiation reached them. Fourteen hours.

She hoped they would not ask how she had survived the destruction of the _Bataille_.

"Copy that, M.E. Niftrik. Please stand by." The answer sounded thin against the backdrop of hisses and pops. Kat smiled at her wrist, anyway, delighted by the fact she'd been able to do something, speak to someone. The act of reaching out had shaken off the sense of nightmare that gripped her.

"We got through," she said to Shepard, feeling the need to celebrate the success with her collaborator. "Maybe they can send someone out to the asteroid to pick me up." Her bubble popped as she calculated the number of hours they would need to reach her. "Shit."

She had lasted a day without food. If Shepard could collect more water for her, or somehow extract some nutrients from the soil of the asteroid, she might last a week. One hundred and sixty eight hours. It would be subsistence. By the end of the week, she would be in full hibernation mode. Any ship dispatched from Clobaka would need at least half that to circle around the flare. Maybe more. If they could spare a ship.

Maybe Shepard could carry her toward the planet.

First, he had to dig her out of the asteroid. Enough of the chimney remained that he had been able to collect the signal from her omni-tool and boot it, tight-beam, toward the last planet in the system. They would have to widen it substantially to extract her and her protective bubble.

Fifteen minutes later, her omni-tool hissed again. "M.E. Niftrik, this Comm Officer Franseza, Herald Station. Data confirmed. Evacuation begun. Please report current status. Telemetry puts you on object GTH678BDF10457D2." The comms officer enunciated each letter military fashion, drawing out the designation of Rocky to ridiculous lengths. Then, he concluded, "Do you require assistance?"

Kat gave the answer Shepard had helped her prepare. "Yes. Escape pod hull fractured. Using an eezo barrier to maintain integrity. Have limited supplies. Require rescue at soonest."

Fifteen minutes later, Franseza replied. "Acknowledged."

Closing the connection, Kat said, "You have more personality than he has."

_Will take that as a compliment. _

She chuckled, then, as she read Shepard's continuing reply, laughed.

He'd typed: _I've had over two hundred years to work on it, after all._

"The histories don't really mention the fact you had a sense of humour."

_Out of practice. Glad you are amused._

She was. But, they still had the problem of how she would survive until rescue. Sobering, Kat said, "I don't suppose you can bake rock into bread?"

_No. Not Jesus. _

Yeah, this guy was a hoot. But he raised an interesting point. "What can you do? I mean, you've done something other than drift around for two hundred years, right? Is this your thing? Rescuing damsels in distress?" What about Finch, for that matter. Why hadn't he rescued Finch? "Did you know there was someone else on the ship with me?"

_Finch_.

"Yes, Finch."

Her throat closed and her chest ached. Finch. He'd been such a nice guy. A big teddy bear. Kat knew they'd have probably gone their separate ways when the job finished, but she thought they'd remain friends. Fuck, she'd even wondered if they might look for another job together. They made a damned good team, and they liked each other. That was rare.

Thin, gummy tears burned the corners of her eyes. Kat reached up to swipe at them and blinked as her hand bounced off her helmet, sending a small, blue shockwave across the bubble of eezo. She sniffed instead and let her chin dip toward her chest.

"Why didn't you save him?" she asked.

_Not what I do. _

"Fuck that, you're a hero. Heroes save people." Her head snapped up. "Are you seriously telling me you chose not to save my friend?"

_Not a hero. Not anymore._

Nothing fed a temper like fatigue and the shredded feeling left behind by stress. Balling her fists, Kat lifted her chin and growled, the sound high-pitched like a constrained scream. "Then fuck off, just go, will you? I don't want your creepy ass looking over my shoulder or wrapped around the walls or whatever. Just fucking go!"

Even as the words tripped off her tongue, Kat knew she was being needlessly spiteful. She knew that if Shepard withdrew his presence from the cavern, the roof would probably collapse on her and kill her. She was too damned tired to grapple with the bigger picture, though. The implications of what had happened to the _Bataille_. Why Finch was dead, why she was alive.

Then, as quickly as it had risen, her temper faded. She sat down with a bounce and jerk and curled into the rocky overhang, the jagged edges cushioned by the feedback bullshit of the barrier Shepard had wrapped around her. Disconsolately, she waited for spongy feeling to dissipate. Evidence the former hero had decided to fuck off and do his questionably good deeds elsewhere.

He didn't leave.

"Why are you still here?"

_I chose to save you, Kat. When it was not my place to choose. Now I choose to stay._

She felt her brow wrinkling, the dry crinkle of skin across her forehead. Man, she was probably a mess. Filthy, smelly, chapped skin, cracked lips, red nostrils that probably shone with grease and sweat and tears. Why that should matter, especially now, she had no idea. The dry pull of skin across her forehead had distracted her, was all. _Tired, so damned tired_. And hungry.

"What do you mean it wasn't your place to choose?" _And thank you for staying, even though I really don't want you to, but sort of do and fuck, what if this is just all me talking to myself?_

Kat wrapped her hands around her helmeted head and rocked back and forth slowly, methodically. Silence answered her. Yawning and empty silence. Ha! she thought. He doesn't have an answer for me. Then she remembered his responses came by way of quiet orange letters flicking into being over her wrist. Kat lowered her arms and looked at the stream of type hovering against the dusty atmosphere outside the barrier.

_I exist for one purpose. To control the Reapers. They are in dark space, retired. Now I wait, observe. I hope that in 50,000 years I will not be insane._

"Oh, my God."


	23. twenty-three

twenty-three

_"See, even she thinks we're a god."_

_"Shut the FUCK up."_

_"Did we used to swear?"_

He didn't know. The memories returned to him with his name were so vast, so full of pitfalls of despair and confusion, Shepard had not examined them in detail. He'd pulled out the parts that jabbed him in the metaphorical ribs, the painful parts, the memories that didn't want to be forgotten. He'd left the rest for later.

_Got nothing but time._

Would examination of self, for 49,179 years, send him through the wormhole of insanity? The Catalyst had sounded anything but sane. Hell, that was half the reason Shepard had made the choice he had. An arrogant, self-absorbed, hero-complex-driven desire to do better. To FIX SHIT once and for all.

Accessing the stream of energy that buzzed around Kat's wrist, Shepard typed: _I am sorry about Finch_.

He was. He might have lost his humanity, but he had not lost the capacity to feel. His emotions had been muted, mostly a matter of anxiety and memory, but now that he knew who he was, or had been, he felt everything. He understood Kat's pain.

_I know what it is to lose a friend_, he added.

Kat didn't answer, but her posture suggested thought rather than utter despair. She was upset, he could see it in the lines of her face, the way her chin kept dipping toward her chest as if holding her head up proved too much effort.

Shepard let her rest. He turned his attention to other problems, of which there were many. His damsel in distress had no food. He could continue to extract and combine the building blocks of water from the thin atmosphere inside the asteroid, but food was another matter entirely. He couldn't make food. Even ground up, the rock of the asteroid lacked the right protein strings. Kat would not be able to digest it.

He also had the small snippet of entity to consider. The inert lump of something hanging in space where the _Bataille_ had been some twenty four hours earlier. Out of curiosity, Shepard expanded the bubble around it and watched, unsurprised, as the dark mass expanded along with, eating the space dust and adding it to its mass.

_"Wonderful."_

The flicker of annoyance incited by the sarcastic jibe from the kernel faded into absorbed thought. He'd talked to himself before he had died, so he could hardly claim to be surprised by the fact he did so afterward.

Seeking a distraction, Shepard turned his attention to Clobaka. The terraforming platforms housed approximately three hundred scientists and their families. As he watched, the first two shuttles rose from the planet surface. Apprehension gripped him, briefly, until he remembered Cerberus did not have ships circling the planet waiting to gun down traitors to their twisted cause.

Cerberus had gunships somewhere. As an entity, they still existed and were just as dangerous as the blob of black he kept as a souvenir. But they were not his concern right now. Not his concern, ever, really.

Back at the asteroid, he considered the problem of tunneling through the collapsed tunnel so he could extract Kat and ferry her to safety. Could he carry her to Clobaka in time to board one of the shuttles? Theoretically, he could. The explanations behind her journey and subsequent appearance at the far end of the system would require more than theory, however.

One problem at a time.

He began absorbing and moving rock.


	24. twenty-four

twenty-four

Grit rained down across the top of the barrier, a whisper of sound that took a while to register over the quiet in and out of her own breath. Kat shifted against her not-so-soft cushion of rock and looked up.

"Are we tunneling to freedom?" she asked.

_Yes_, came the reply.

"No point."

The lack of immediate response from Shepard felt like an agreement of a sort. Or an argument. Her frayed temper flared and died. Nope, she was too tired for an argument.

"You should've saved Finch. He'd figure a way out of this."

_I chose you._

There was that word again. Choice seemed to be a big deal to Shepard, and why not. He was dead and probably didn't want to be. But he'd chosen to die, he'd made the ultimate sacrifice. Fuck, he had chosen to watch over the galaxy he obviously loved. And he'd been rewarded with toys and a mission that would probably drive him insane. What a way to go.

"Why me?"

_You reminded me of someone._

A blonde brow arched. Kat lifted away from the wall. "Oh?"

_A friend. More. Someone I loved._

Well, if that wasn't flattering and creepy at the same time. But the answer resonated. Shepard had lost all his friends. All the people he loved. He had sacrificed himself for them, had walked away to serve a greater good. Kat shook her head, knowing without even having to articulate the thought, that she could not do the same. She wasn't that selfless.

"What was her name?" Kat assumed it was a she. The majority of human relationships were still heterosexual. Something to do with biology, she supposed. Sex with the same could be fun. She'd tried it. Two women shacked up on an empty frigate got as horny as two men. But as advanced as their race was, they still had a lot of primal urges.

'Course, a man's primal urge was usually to stick it where it fit.

Where did Shepard stick it?

_Wow, did I really just have that thought?_

He couldn't hear her thoughts, could he?

A name blinked across her holographic display: _Jack_.

Kat smiled. It was a nice, simple name and it suited, somehow, that the man Shepard had loved had been…not simple, but perhaps uncomplicated.

"So, how exactly did I remind you of Jack? Dude have blonde hair or something?" Automatically, her glove smoothed over the top of her helmet. She could probably deactivate it again, but she felt more secure with it in place, funky vomit-sweat-piss smell and all.

_When I first met her, she had no hair._

Jack was a woman, then. Interesting.

_And tattoos._

"I don't have any tatts." She'd thought about getting one, but figured if she was going to mark herself indelibly, the picture or symbol or slice of thought should mean something. Maybe she had it wrong, though. Maybe it didn't need to mean anything other than, 'Hey, I like pie'.

_I called her Sunshine._

As the nickname formed over her wrist, Kat blinked back hot tears. Goddamn it. Had Shepard secretly been a big teddy bear of a guy as well? With a hidden core of sweetness? None of the vids, historical or hysterical, hinted at it, but to Kat's mind, it made sense he might not have been everything he appeared. Took years to really get to know a person, which was why she was still single. Took commitment and a job that didn't pull a girl from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Sniffing, again, Kat said, "I don't know why Finch called me that. I'm not a really sunny person, you know? I can be a snarky bitch, 'specially in the morning. Before coffee. Or any time of day when shit doesn't go as planned. When I need a drink. I can be…not nice."

She'd had a solid eighteen months of being really nasty on Omega, conning dweebs for dust credits and so on. If she hadn't run afoul of Maxim and had to hightail it out of there, she might already be dead. Just another strung out, nameless dust-whore scooped out of a cable trench and fed to the incinerator.

_That's probably why he called you Sunshine._

"How does that possibly make sense?"

_Finch had a good sense of humour._

"Oh, and you'd know all about that, wouldn't you, Jesus."

_John, but you can all me Christ if you want._

Kat's lips twitched. Then, as had become habit down in the deep dungeon of Rocky, she sighed and her almost-smile faded. "Finch was a good guy."

_I have no doubt he was. I'm sorry, Kat_. The letters paused, glowing dully in space, then began to fade as he typed more. _I am more now than I was before I encountered you. Before this event. Something has changed_.

Though the words did little to assuage her grief, she felt the sincerity behind them. She grasped what she thought Shepard tried to communicate.

A large chunk of rock bounced off the ceiling of her protective bubble. Kat pushed up to her feet and aimed the light from her tool at the chimney. "How's it going up there?"

_Nearly done._

"What you can do is pretty amazing, you know."

_Yep_. Then, _What I can't do is pretty annoying_.

Kat smiled properly. Then she had a thought. "Hey, can you boost the signal of my tool to the relay in Newton? Maybe I can send a distress call to Jormangund. They might have a faster ship or solution or something."

It was a long shot. But with vectors and trajectories and all that astrographic bullshit, it was possible they could reach her more quickly than the hapless scientists fleeing the bee hive of Clobaka. Math in space was weird.

_Why Jormangund?_

"They were my employer for this contract. They owned the frigate."

_I advise against contacting them. The entity was a part of the frigate. Their frigate._

Holy fuck. Kat blew out a deep breath as a wave of dizziness caused her to sway from foot to foot. Shepard was right. He had taken thoughts she'd considered earlier and extrapolated them into a full-fledged theory. Shit.

"Okay, but I'm running out of options, here. Got any other ideas?"

_Yes._

Kat didn't let out a celebratory whoop. The ghost of John Shepard sounded more human by the minute, but he was still odd. Cautiously, she asked, "What's the plan?"

_I carry you to an abandoned mining colony on Tungel and you appropriate a shuttle._

"You mean steal."

_No one is using it._

"At the moment."

Words rolled through the air. _The mining platform has not been operational for thirty seven years. The small craft inside the hangar may not even be functioning. But you could fix it_.

"Or call for help."

_How would you explain how you got to Tungel?_

Kat bit a dry lip and mumbled, "Shit." She sucked a tight, dry breath over tight, dry lips. "You really think Jormangund had something to do with the Octopus of Doom?"

_A better question might be: Do you want to ask them?_

No, she didn't, because they'd either think she was insane or they'd kill her.

Shaking her head, the field of her helmet warping her view for half a second, Kat mentally denied the idea she'd somehow stumbled into some sort of corporate intrigue. This was real life, damn it. And Finch was dead and she had seen black tendrils of dark matter curling through space, eating the wreckage of the ship she had been sent to repair. A ship with organic circuitry.

"Fuck. Okay, Tungel it is." From there, she could call someone. Reconnect with reality. The galaxy was a busy place. Not everyone would know, or care, that she'd nearly died on a job. The news vids wouldn't carry her story. She could remain under the radar until she figured out what to do. She had enough currency, in credits and favours, to take a break.

So long as she didn't buy any gloves.


	25. twenty-five

twenty-five

Shepard did not think about how he carried Kat through space. He did not wonder how he had turned rock into gravel and dust and extracted the envelope of air he'd thrust underground several hours earlier. The sealed bubble of O2 that served as Kat's prison and transport. He did not consider the deeper concepts; his being wrapped around a person, his skin filtering the air. The shape of him altering to cushion her against the pull of acceleration and the turbulence of atmosphere once they reached Tungel.

He understood his physical limits; knew, instinctively—if a being of substance could claim such—what he could and could not do. He had begun to appreciate the fact he had not tested his mental limits and that, perhaps, they were more important. Especially considering his purpose, or lack thereof.

Maybe the arbitrary figure of 50,000 years no longer applied. Maybe, in taking responsibility for the most awful scourge the galaxy had ever known, he'd done more than reset the clock. Maybe he had broken it, which was a scary thought, as thoughts went. Shepard had never been without a purpose. Ever. Even when locked in a cell, he had done his best to retain his physical condition and mental acuity. Even when socialising, he remained sharp and alert. He did not know how to relax.

He had a purpose now.


	26. twenty-six

twenty-six

The derelict mining platform had a gloomy appearance, the landscape around it desolate. The dense atmosphere covered the crawler marks until her bubble touched the surface, then she saw the confusion of tracks running every which way, flattened dust that glistened as if ionized, and the bowl shape of large, trackless wheels. It looked like a large, hot snake had slithered back and forth, crushing and melting the ground.

A cluster of prefabs surrounded a satellite tower. Lights picked out the height of the tower, all the way to the top, indicating the station still had power. On the ground, Kat could see the dull red glow of door locks. Only one building had no door, a two story open-air hangar that housed ground transport vehicles. She suspected they would all be locked. A second domed structure was large enough to hold a shuttle.

Kat blew out a breath. Sufficiently charged, a shuttle could get her to the next system, to the mass relay. She wouldn't dare fly it through the gate. It would be ripped apart. But the relay could boost her signal. From there, she could place a call. She might even get a call out before then, depending on interference from the flare.

The landscape before her wavered slightly, then popped into sharp focus. Kat tapped her helmet, then shivered as she realised what had happened. Shepard's bubble had disappeared.

"Are you still there?"

She felt naked and exposed. What had been her prison had become her sanctuary. Shepard had protected her from the destruction of the _Bataille_, vacuum, the black shit in space, radiation and acceleration, atmosphere, a solar flare and a fucking cave in. Kat turned a slow circle, then thought to check her tool.

_Here_. The letters glowed dully in the dense atmosphere of the planet. _Thought you might want to walk_.

Kat laughed. "Walk? When I can ride the hero chariot?"

_Hero chariot? Ha ha_.

"Did I just make you laugh?"

_I am amused._

So was Kat, though the light moment left her feeling giddy. She was running on empty. Turning around again, she chose one of the prefabs and began walking toward it. "I need food, then I'll secure my escape vehicle." Which sounded a damn sight better than 'steal a shuttle'.

_Detecting a ship entering the system_. The letters of Shepard's report pulsed once and then disappeared as he continued, _Heading is…last known coordinates of the Bataille_.

A shiver clawed its way down Kat's spine. "Shit, you sure?" Why did dread curl in her belly? It could be a rescue mission. "Can you read the ship's designation?"

_JG4534_, he typed. _The_ _Specht_.

"That's Kaufer's son," Kat said, her voice sounded squashed. "Kaufer is the head guy at Jormangund."

She'd reached the squat building and tapped at the lock. When it didn't open, she accessed her menu of overrides. Despite the exposed feeling of being outside her protective sphere of...whatever, Kat's fingers were sure as she chose the correct routine and hacked the lock. The door slid open and she stepped inside a small, sealed vestibule. The building had an airlock. If it had a protein bar and a shower, sonic or otherwise, it would equal the nicest suite in the nicest hotel on the Citadel. Or Omega. Standards were lower there.

While the 'lock cycled, Kat turned her attention to the matter of Wessel Kaufer. "He's a playboy. Rich kid with an expensive education and a degree his father paid for. Spends most of his time racing yachts and fucking his bodyguards." A half smile crooked her lips. "Could be the other way 'round, too. He's just shy of deviant." There were plenty of folks in relationships with AIs, ships with convenient ports and tactile bays. Took a lot of imagination to be truly deviant in the twenty-fourth century.

The wall panel flashed, a line of green lights pinging on, one after the other, and the inner door hissed open. Kat stepped into the unit and checked her HUD. All green there, too. She deactivated her helmet and took a cautious breath. Air tasted flat and lifeless, but her eyeballs didn't fizz and pop.

_Good enough. _

She scanned her surroundings. An office with six desks parked together in a cluster and one larger desk behind a deactivated partition. Emergency lighting gave the large room a forlorn appearance. It felt abandoned and sorta sad. But the lack of absolute chaos was reassuring. The place had been packed up. There were no scattered papers, spilled coffee cups and dead bodies.

Suppressing a shudder, Kat approached the first of the three doors set into the far wall. She knew how to order spicy noodles and cold beer in sixteen languages. The sign on the door didn't offer either of those and she could turn the damned handle faster than she could pull up a translation module. The sight of the small kitchen pulled her lips so wide, they cracked.

When even smiling hurt…

Kat began pulling open cupboards and noticed orange text floating over her wrist.

_I've been listening to Kaufer's ship. He responded to the same signal that pulled me to the Kepler Verge. _

"Pulled you…wait, you can listen…of course you can." Kat shook her head and licked her poor lips, the tang of blood on her tongue too damned familiar. "He…" She stopped again as the dread in her gut curled tighter. "What else?"

_The Specht is scanning for debris and bioforms. _

"Are they looking for me?"

_You and Herfer Finch._

"Herfer?" What the fuck kind of name was that? Kat's mouth curved into another painful smile as she imagined asking Finch directly, teasing him about his weird ass first name. Then her smile fell away, dropped to the floor, and the weight of the ensuing sadness pulled her shoulders down, curving her spine. Eyes closing, Kat leaned forward so that her forehead rested against one of the smooth cupboards.

She knew the punch would bruise less and less. That one day she'd think of Finch and just smile. Hell, she'd lost friends before. Comrades in arms and fellow junkies. Folks who had been friends by association. Finch had been more than a friend, though. He'd been damned easy company and good. Fucking good. Sweet behind the sass. Big, all gruff and bear-like, but sharp and righteous when it counted.

A quiet sob shook her shoulders and Kat sniffed wetly. She could easily peg her emotional state on exhaustion, but crying because she was sad seemed better, somehow. More like a tribute to Finch.

"Herfer Finch," she whispered. "Gonna keep that name somewhere. Remember who it belonged to."

She leaned back, swiped at her eyes and winced as the mucky sleeve of her suit scraped her skin. Fuck, she was tired of being filthy and tired and sad and hungry and all the rest of it. Kat reached up to pull open the cupboard and then stared disconsolately into the dark, empty square. She tried the next, found the plates and shit, then tried the next. Glassware and mugs. She pulled out a glass and tried the faucet over the sink. After a gurgle, water gushed out. The smell hit her first, the stink of off rocket fuel. Grimacing, she set the glass aside and continued opening cupboards. The tall one at the end had what she looked for; canned water and boxed rations. With a trembling hand, she pulled one of each off the shelf and then looked between them, trying to decide which to have first. Her cracked lips decided for her. She needed a drink.

The water tasted like the air, flat and dead. Any minerals added to make it more nourishing than water (seriously?) were probably inert by now. Thirty years was a long time for water to sit still. The ration bar tasted like the fucking wrapper, but her body didn't care. Kat chuckled as her stomach rolled and growled, clawed its way up to greet the food coming down. She hadn't even finished chewing the first bar before she unwrapped the second. Another can of water and she felt halfway human.

"Now I need a shower." Kat checked her wrist for messages and sighed quietly at the lack of orange lettering. She didn't mind being alone, but she'd sorta got used to Shepard's company. "How's tricks?" she asked, hoping for a short report.

_Tricky_, came the reply.

"Ha, ha." Kat pushed off the counter and sauntered toward the door, her movement somnolent. "What's happening over there?"

_Kaufer is not happy. The creature was definitely his. He has pinged the entire system looking for it. He's spinning a story for his father at present. Solar flare destroyed the Bataille, taking you and Finch down with the ship. Kaufer senior sounds…terse_.

The last sentence hung in the air for a few seconds before fading. Kat looked up and purse her lips. "This is fucked up." She had a hard time mustering outrage—at the idea Wessel Kaufer had some secret project going on, that his giant octopus of death or whatever rated more highly on the search scale than her apparently dead body, and that her entire life had been turned upside down and inside out in one day.

She turned her attention to the second door and found a storage room. Third door had what she needed. As she began stripping off her suit, Kat wondered if shit would make any more sense after she showered. After she slept? After she reconnected with someone real. She felt flat and dead, like the water and air in the prefab. Left behind to weather thirty years of neglect.

Her suit pooled awkwardly around her boots, Kat sat to do what she should have done first, remove the magnetic fuckers. She kicked away the heavy footwear and dead skin of her vacuum suit and sat for a moment longer, clad only in a tank and underwear that had seen better days. Much better days. Leaning forward, Kat propped her elbows on her knees and wrapped her hands around her sore head. The stink of sweat and piss wafted up from her undergarments, effectively ending her small moment. A girl couldn't think while she swallowed and gagged.

Tank and underpants joined her suit on the floor and she ducked into the sonic shower. While the pulse crept across he skin, disintegrating grime and pummeling small knots of tension into submission—she had the pressure dialed up HIGH—Kat made an effort not to think. She needed a break.


	27. twenty-seven

twenty-seven

"Herschel is classed energetic. It flares all the time."

"Really, Wessel? Did you decide that for yourself? Is that your scientific opinion?"

The younger Kaufer scowled at the image of the older. Shepard examined the features of both men and found the older version to be more to his liking. Experience lined Jorge Kaufer's face. Disappointment and humour creased the skin around his eyes. He looked like a man who had weathered life. In comparison, his son's visage seemed artificially smooth. Characterless.

"I can collect data and forward you a full scientific report if you wish." Each word had a bitten quality to it, as if they had been forced from his lips half-chewed. Wessel's jaw tightened as he awaited his father's response.

"I wish. And, Wessel? Make a substantive effort to locate the two missing engineers. Document it."

_"Substantive? Doesn't he mean substantial?"_

_"I don't think he does."_

_"A half-assed attempt gives Sunshine a better chance to stay undetected."_

_"Half-assed? Are we adopting Kat's terminology now?"_

_"If it fits."_

It did. Shepard turned his attention back to the woman in question and noted she had found the shower. He could no more stop his mental gaze from tracing the lines of her naked body than he could pretend he could not see. Kat was a tall woman, and well built. Her limbs were long and lithe, the outline of hard-earned muscle obvious beneath her smooth skin. Her shoulders were broad, but not unnaturally so. They angled out over hips just as wide, but curved. The muscles of her thighs and buttocks flexed as she moved, turned to give him a view of her back side.

Shepard could look at her from the front if he wished. He could look through her skin and watch her bones shift, her tendons pull taught and snap back. He could watch blood pump through her veins, lungs expand and contract, follow the path of her small meal through her intestine. Instead, he watched the angled points of her shoulder blades move as she reached up to rub her hands through her short, blonde hair.

He wondered what her hair would feel like. If it would be soft, but still short enough to tickle a palm. He remembered what his hair had felt like. What Jack's hair had felt like when it defied her severe cut.

Unbidden, a memory of Jack surfaced. Him and Jack in a shower, one supplied with water that felt cool against the heat of their skin as they moved together, her pressed against the wall, both legs tucked around his hips. He remembered the taste of her neck, water splashed skin and the hint of something exotic. The tingle of eezo that always greeted his lips when he kissed her, the way her body seemed to buzz beneath his hands, just as his did for her.

Her shorn hair had felt like that. His, too. That tickle across the palm. Maybe that's why they had both favoured such a short cut—though the pony tail had suited her as well. Softened her without erasing the edge that made her Jack, the sharp beauty of her features, the graceful line of her neck.

Grief stabbed through his being, not softened by the memory, by the vague feeling of lust and satiety, need and fulfillment.

Shepard turned away from Kat, unabashed but filled with regret.


	28. twenty-eight

twenty-eight

She was officially dead. The report had been filed. Jormangund had turned in the paperwork three hours ago, while she slept on a dusty couch in an abandoned shack on Tungel. Life got weird sometimes, but this took the proverbial fucking cake.

"So, I'm dead? Really dead?"

_Yes._

"No one is coming to rescue me."

_No._

Shepard's short answers seemed to perfectly gauge her mood.

"I can change it, right? Turn up somewhere and say, 'Hey, I'm not dead, it was a mistake'."

_I had to do that once._

"Really?"

_Paperwork was a bitch._

He was messing with her, wasn't he? "I liked you better before you found your sense of humour."

Kat reached up to rub the back of her head. The lump was still there, but diminished. Not as painful to touch. Her head felt clear. Food and rest had made her feel human again. Able to cope. Pushing her tank and knickers through the sonic shower had freshened them enough that she smelt human again, too. She dreaded putting her suit back on, but she couldn't live out her non-life in a shack on Tungel. There was no goddamned coffee in the kitchen for a start.

"What am I going to do, what does a dead person do?"

_Anything they want._

"My credits, my stuff!"

Shepard's last message faded, the space over her wrist echoing oddly, as if his words had acquired sound and the lack of them meant silence. Then he began typing again.

_I can..._ The two words flickered and faded, then appeared again. _I can get you credits, a ship, a home. Anything._

Kat snorted. "Is that what you _choose_ to do, John?"

_I feel responsible._

He was and he wasn't. Fuck, he wasn't. If he hadn't answered the call of the Octopus of Doom, she'd be dead. She wouldn't have survived the destruction of the Bataille, the black shit would have consumed her dead body and she'd be… Hell, if he hadn't turned up, she/he/it would have probably eaten the asteroid by now and started sending tendrils toward the nearest planet.

Kat shuddered and pulled her hand away from the back of her head so she could scrub at her cheek. Both hands met in the middle of her face and she bent forward, fingers closed over her eyes, and breathed.

Then she looked up, hands dropping to her lap. "Did I thank you?"

Shepard didn't answer.

"I probably didn't. Too busy bitching. So…ah, thanks. You know, for saving me. I'm dead, but not dead, because of you."

The gratitude felt weird, like an obligation, but not. Kat realised part of it was that she didn't normally thank people for stuff. She just took. She gave back, sometimes. She'd been nice to Finch. She'd liked Finch.

She thought she liked Shepard, too, as weird as he was.

A line of letters glowed over her wrist. She angled her arm down to read them. _You're welcome_.

"So, what's next?"

_A choice._

The hint of a smile curved her lips. "Uh huh. And what's that?"

_Fix a shuttle, fly to the next system, do a bunch of paperwork. _

"Or."

_Stay dead. Follow Wessel Kessler, figure out what the entity was, what his plan was._

"I'm no hero, John."

_You don't have to be. I'll help you._

"Yeah? Why would you do that?"

_Got nothing but time_, came the immediate response. Then, when that faded, he typed, _No one does this shit on their own, Sunshine. A hero isn't a single person. It's…_

Silence pulsed.

_It's about making choices and they won't always be the right ones. A hero isn't perfect. And I'm done with the philosophising. _

"I get it." At least, she thought she did. Kat had no delusion regarding her own capacity to be a hero, but she figured she could keep the ghost of one company for a while. Do the right thing, for a change. Not for credits, or even for the satisfaction of exposing some evil plot. She'd do it for Finch, and for herself. Hell, she'd do it for the adventure. A dead woman didn't exactly have a schedule to keep.

"Okay, let's do this thing, John. Let's you and me figure shit out and make sure Wessel Bloody Kaufer isn't nesting planet eaters across the galaxy."


	29. twenty-nine

twenty-nine

He liked that Kat called him John.

Jack always called him Shepard. Everyone had. He was always Shepard. N7, war criminal, last hope of the galaxy, hero.

Ghost.

With a simple choice, by using his first name, Kat made him feel like a man.

end of part one

* * *

A/N:

It's been a while since I've written fan fiction. I missed it. Writing "Sunshine" reminded me of how much fun it was to revisit a world I loved. To speculate. To further the stories of the characters I felt a connection with. My previous fan fiction stories have all been set in the world of Dragon Age. I still get notes from fans of those stories asking when I'll write the next chapter for Aedan and Leliana. I'm sorry I haven't. I miss them, definitely. In writing Sunshine, I've put together another handful of characters that are going to tap tap at my conscience for more words. The bane of any writer, eh?

This story came from exactly the same place as "The Hero of Ferelden", though. I finished the game and asked: what's next? The control ending is not a popular one. I'm not going to debate the pros and cons of any of the Mass Effect 3 endings; I simply want to share my vision of what happens to Shepard after he disappears. I have often wondered where he went.

Several people have already asked if I plan to continue this story. The simple answer is: yes. I have a ton of ideas. The more complicated answer involves finding time to write it. I'm currently working on the sequel to "Less Than Perfect", which is original fiction. (Science fiction/romance, published and available at Amazon, etc, for those interested in checking it out. Message me for details. :) )

I will try. I love this story and would like to see it continue. I'd like to make the same promise for Aedan and Leliana, but I only have so much time. Never say never, though!

As always, thank you to BioWare for allowing me to play in their sandbox. Thank you to Whuffie for the wonderful art work she made for this story. It can be viewed at Ao3. Look for "sisimka" :). Finally, thanks to Azzy and Bioticbooty for organising the Mass Effect Big Bang.


End file.
